About ten minutes after sunset, the planet Jupiter begins to reveal itself high overhead. This is a great time to investigate the planet’s belt and zones structure before the brightness of its cloud tops overwhelms the view. I first happened upon this technique back in 1994 when Comet SL-9 was impacting Jupiter. I saw amazing detail minutes after sunset but was harder to observe the fine stuff when the sky was black.

Eridanus the River is a long but narrow constellation found at this time of year above the southern horizon or at least it's top half as seen from Canada. Starting close to the celestial equator, the entire asterism stretches down almost sixty degrees. Unlike the brilliant suns of the constellation Orion to the left, Eridanus lacks any bring stars and only range in brightness from magnitude 3.2 to 5.0 except for magnitude 2.9 Cursa. They are however unique in their individual life stories.

Breaking news: Not one but two supernovas have been discovered on consecutive days. First, we have a magnitude 13.9 explosion occurring in the spiral galaxy NGC 4080 that was discovered on Oct 28. Located 49 million light-years in the constellation Coma Berenices, this magnitude 13.7 galaxy is located at R.A. 12h 40m 52s, Dec. +26d 59m 47s.