Cosmic Highlights
A monthly night sky guide to what’s worth capturing right now.
NOVEMBER 2026
November — One of Everything
Most months in this guide have a speciality. March and April belong to the galaxies — three quarters of everything at its best is a galaxy, and you may as well put the narrowband filter away. December is nebula month. June is for clusters. You can usually tell what kind of night you are in for before you have read the list.
November is the exception. Of the sixteen objects peaking this month, six are nebulae, five are open clusters and five are galaxies. It is the most even split of the year, and the only month where no single family takes even forty per cent of the list. Nothing dominates. For once the question is not what is up — it is what kind of night you feel like having.
Because those are three genuinely different nights. A cluster night is short and cheerful: no filter, an hour, sometimes half an hour, and you are finished and choosing the next one. A nebula night is a dual-band filter and three to six hours, and two of this month's are so large that the honest answer is a camera lens rather than a telescope. A galaxy night is the patient one — a dark window, no filter, and faint outer structure arriving slowly while you wait for it.
Where you stand decides how much of that spread lands over your head. In the north it is nearly all of it: nine of the sixteen sit in Cassiopeia and Perseus alone, both near the zenith around midnight. In the south the list is short, and the nights are shortening with it — but what is there is worth the trip. Fornax carries two of the finest barred spirals anywhere to the top of the sky, and M77 in Cetus is as well placed as it gets all year.
The New Moon falls on the 9th, so the run from roughly the 5th to the 13th is where the faint work belongs — and both halves of the Taurids peak inside that window, which does not happen often. Whatever kind of night you are after, the first half of the month is where to put it.
The Night Sky at a Glance
Northern Hemisphere Sky – Midnight at New Moon (at +40° latitude)
Image from the app Stellarium
Perseus sits almost at the zenith at midnight with Cassiopeia just north-west of it, and between them they carry most of this page — M34, the Double Cluster, NGC 663, NGC 1491, the California and the Heart and Soul are every one of them above 65°. Andromeda is a little west of overhead with NGC 752 and NGC 891 in it. Taurus has already swung round into the south-east, the Pleiades near the top of the sky and Orion well clear of the horizon behind it. Of the Summer Triangle only Deneb is left, low in the north-west. The nights are long enough that none of this needs rushing.
Southern Hemisphere Sky – Midnight at New Moon (at -30° latitude)
Image from the app Stellarium
Fornax and Cetus ride high through the middle of the night and carry every southern target this month — NGC 1097 and NGC 1365 both within a few degrees of the zenith, M77 high in the north-west. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds stand well up in the south at around 45°, with 47 Tucanae beside the smaller of the two. Even the Pleiades is worth the walk outside: it reaches about 35° in the north, low by northern standards but perfectly workable. Spring is turning into summer, so the dark hours are getting shorter from here.
The Best-Placed Objects This Month
These objects reach their highest point around midnight. That means better visibility, longer imaging windows, and a great chance to explore some of the best deep-sky objects.
Every night, for your sky
This page tells you what is best placed this month. TonightPlan tells you what is worth photographing tonight, from where you are actually standing, with the gear you own, under tonight's Moon and tonight's weather. It knows when your darkness starts and ends, which targets clear your horizon, and which ones the Moon has ruled out. No sign-up, nothing to install, and nothing stored about you on any server. Free, because the sky above us is for everyone.
M45 — Pleiades
Object type: Star cluster
Constellation: Taurus
Apparent dimensions: ~80′
Filtering: No filter / dark skies
Recommended integration: 1–3h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Low
The blue glow is not the cluster. It is a dust cloud the Pleiades happen to be passing through, the stars and the nebula completely unrelated beyond sharing a line of sight. The cluster itself is visible to the naked eye from a city centre, even under a full Moon — what the camera adds is everything around it: icy blue wisps trailing off the brightest stars, dark rifts threading between them. The stars are barely a hundred million years old, hot enough to scatter blue light off whatever they pass through. At 444 light-years this is one of the closest clusters to Earth, and it has been recorded by more cultures than almost anything else in the sky.
Everyone finds this one first and most people stop too early. The stars are easy and they are not the picture. Eighty arcminutes across means a wide field is not optional, and the reflection nebulosity is faint enough that a darker sky and a few hours separate a bright asterism from the thing people photograph it for. No filter — narrowband has nothing here to work with, because none of this is emission.
M45, captured with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 at f/4.12 and an ASI2600MM Pro camera using LRGBH filters
M45, captured using a Vaonis Vespera II smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
The stars arrive in the first sub; everything after that is the dust. Three and a half hours on a Vespera II builds the blue veils and the dark lanes threading between them. Nearly three full Moons wide, so give it room — this is one to frame generously rather than fill.
NGC 869 & 884 — Double Cluster
Object type: Star cluster
Constellation: Perseus
Apparent dimensions: 60′ × 30′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: 1–3h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Horizon
Two rich open clusters side by side, close enough to share a single frame — which is genuinely uncommon. Both are young, around thirteen million years old, packed with hot blue-white stars and salted with a few orange supergiants that do all the colour work. They mark the Sword Handle of Perseus and have been known since antiquity; Hipparchus recorded the pair around 130 BC. Roughly 7,500 light-years away. It is a classic first-telescope object and refreshingly undemanding: bright, easy, and lovely from the city under almost any instrument.
Point, shoot, done — and that is not a criticism. Sixty arcminutes end to end means the only real decision is whether your field holds both, and if it does there is nothing else to get right. An hour is generous. This is the target to put on while you are still deciding what the serious work of the night is going to be, and it will be finished before you have made up your mind. If you shoot mono there is more here than the clusters: faint hydrogen in the background of the field, which takes an H-alpha channel and a long stack to bring up.
NGC 869 & 884, captured with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 at f/4.12 and an ASI2600MM Pro camera using RGBH filters
NGC 869 & 884, captured using a Vaonis Vespera II smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Both cores resolve into individual stars rather than a haze, and the orange supergiants stand out among the blue straight away. A Moon and a suburban sky cost it nothing. Two full Moons end to end, so the pair wants the field — nothing else about it asks for anything.
M34 — Spiral Cluster
Object type: Star cluster
Constellation: Perseus
Apparent dimensions: ~35′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: 1–3h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Very low
A loose, bright cluster about 1,500 light-years away with real colour character — blue-white hot stars alongside warm orange members, spread across an area close to the size of the full Moon. The wide spacing gives it a relaxed, open feel that suits wider fields well. Around a hundred stars, roughly 250 million years old, probably first recorded by Hodierna before 1654 and catalogued by Messier afterwards.
A genuine pleasure to image and a reliable result even from compromised skies. There is no filter decision, no integration decision and no framing problem: at thirty-five arcminutes it sits comfortably in almost anything. What you are actually photographing is the colour separation between the blue members and the orange ones, and that comes up quickly. Spend the time you save on something that needs it.
M34, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
The blue-white members and the handful of warm orange ones come cleanly out of a sparse field, and moonlight barely touches them. Just over a full Moon across. If you want one result safely in hand early in the night, this is the one to point at first.
NGC 752
Object type: Star cluster
Constellation: Andromeda
Apparent dimensions: ~60′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: 1–3h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Low
A big, loose cluster that fills a whole frame, two full Moons across. At more than a billion years it is old for an open cluster and it shows: many of its brighter stars have turned gold and orange, because red giants make up much of its bright population now. A bright orange pair sits just below the centre, with a second, brighter pair at the bottom edge. Probably first recorded by Hodierna before 1654, then lost until Caroline Herschel found it again in 1783. It holds a blue straggler and the eclipsing binary DS Andromedae.
The thing to understand about this one is that it is not a dense knot you point at — it is a field. Bright enough for a city sky, and a bright Moon barely touches it, so it is a target for the nights the rest of this page cannot use. Sixty arcminutes of loose stars needs all the field you can give it; shoot it tight and you simply photograph part of it.
NGC 752, captured using a DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Give this one the widest field you own — crop in and the subject stops existing. What you get is the gold of the old giants standing against the fainter white members, and it is among the few here that does not care what the Moon is doing.
NGC 663
Object type: Star cluster
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Apparent dimensions: ~16′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: <1h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Not visible
A loose scatter of a few hundred stars, most of them young, hot and blue-white — a cluster only about twenty-two million years old, so its brightest members are still burning steadily rather than swollen into red giants. It is known for something you cannot see directly: an unusually high number of Be stars, suns spinning fast enough to fling rings of gas off their own equators. It lies about 7,200 light-years away in a rich stretch of the Cassiopeia Milky Way, one of a chain of bright clusters strung along the same region, and William Herschel found it in 1787. Catalogued as Caldwell 10.
Bright and forgiving. It comes through even a twilit sky, and short integrations are enough to bring out the star colours — this is the shortest recommended session on the page. At sixteen arcminutes it is small, so a slightly wider frame is worth taking: the neighbouring clusters fall into the same field, and the Milky Way behind it is doing a great deal of the work in any case.
NGC 663, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Half the width of the full Moon, which makes the field behind it half the picture. The blue core resolves with two orange stars below it, and it needs very little from you — moonlight and city light both leave it alone. One of the quickest results here.
IC 1805 — Heart Nebula
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Apparent dimensions: 120′ × 90′
Filtering: Dual / Narrowband
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Not visible
Four full Moons wide, and the shape is unmistakable once the hydrogen is lit. What carves it is Melotte 15, a knot of hot, massive young stars at the centre whose winds and radiation have hollowed the gas into the two lobes the nebula is named for. The same winds leave the twisted, corkscrew pillars standing in the bright core, and those are a target in their own right — worth a tight close-up as much as the whole heart is worth a wide field. About 7,000 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, with the Soul Nebula beside it and the Fishhead on its western edge.
A dual-band filter is what makes this one work, and it keeps working under light pollution — the structure comes through cleanly with a Moon in the sky. The catch is scale. Four Moons across is more than the widest smart-telescope field will cover, so the whole shape means a mosaic or a short camera lens. Three to six hours, and more time only buys more dust.
IC 1805, captured with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 at f/4.12 and an ASI2600MM Pro camera using LRGBHSO filters
IC 1805, captured using a Vaonis Vespera II smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Expect the two lobes and the rust-red rim to arrive first, with the twisted pillars around the centre emerging from the pale interior as the stack deepens. Moonlight and city light barely touch it. If the whole shape will not fit your field, the core alone is a target worth having.
IC 1848 — Soul Nebula
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Apparent dimensions: 150′ × 75′
Filtering: Dual / Narrowband
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Not visible
I have never seen a soul in the Soul Nebula. To me it has always looked like an ugly pig having a bad Tuesday. Point a dual-band filter at it and the joke stops: all that hydrogen lights up, and what was a vague smudge turns into something cavernous and structured — bright red rims running along the gas, and blue hollows where clusters of hot young stars buried inside have carved the cloud out from within. Five full Moons end to end, about 7,000 light-years away, born from the same stretch of cloud as the Heart beside it.
It is the largest thing on this page, which forces the same decision as its neighbour: one frame will not hold it, so a mosaic, a short lens, or accept a crop of the richest half. Narrowband is not optional here — it is the difference between the pig and the extraordinary. Three to six hours, and the cavities keep gaining depth.
IC 1848, captured using a ZWO Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
The red rims come up quickly; the blue cavities behind them are what the night is for. One of the few big nebulae that genuinely does not mind a bright Moon or a city — the filter does that work. Five full Moons across, so plan for a mosaic or a crop.
IC 1795 — Fishhead Nebula
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Apparent dimensions: 40′ × 20′
Filtering: Dual / Narrowband
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Not visible
The small one, and the one that actually fits. The Fishhead is a brighter knot on the western edge of the Heart — close enough that the Heart's own frame catches it down in the corner — and at a third of that width it sits comfortably in a single smart-telescope field. A dark lane of dust cuts straight through the bright head and splits it in two, with finer threads running out into the cloud around it and a faint blue glow of oxygen alongside. Its brightest knot carries a designation of its own, NGC 896, found by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. Radio astronomers know the region as W3, where massive stars are still forming today. About 6,500 light-years away.
This is the one of the three you can point a smart telescope at without thinking about mosaics at all. A dual-band filter lifts it cleanly even under light pollution, and the dust is what more time buys — the lane through the head is obvious early, the threads around it much less so. One and a third Moons wide, so it lands with room to spare.
IC 1795, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Nothing about this one asks for a compromise — it lands in a single field with room around it. The split head arrives early; the dust threading the space around it is the part that keeps improving. Neither Moon nor city light gets in the way.
NGC 1491 — Fossil Footprint Nebula
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Perseus
Apparent dimensions: 9′ × 6′
Filtering: Dual / Narrowband
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Very low
The bright heart of it is a blue-white knot with a red rim, and a dark lane of dust cuts into it from one side. That shape earns it both of its names — the Fossil Footprint, and the Little Pacman, because it echoes the much bigger Pacman Nebula over in Cassiopeia. Hot young stars inside it make the surrounding hydrogen glow. It lies somewhere around 10,000 light-years away in Perseus, though the distance is poorly pinned down: published figures run from roughly 8,000 to 11,000.
Two targets in one, really. The core comes up quickly and is bright enough to work under conditions that would ruin most emission nebulae; the fainter red cloud spread around it is what takes the hours, and it is the part that turns a bright blob into a picture. At nine arcminutes by six this is small, so a longer focal length suits it and there is no framing puzzle to solve. Dual-band throughout.
NGC 1491, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Small, and bright exactly where it counts. Under a third of a full Moon across — the core and its red rim arrive early, while the faint cloud wrapped around them is what the rest of the night buys. A dual-band filter, and it takes some Moon without falling apart.
NGC 1499 — California Nebula
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Perseus
Apparent dimensions: 120′ × 60′
Filtering: Dual / Narrowband
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Low
Named for its outline, which genuinely does trace the shape of the US state once you have seen it. It is an emission nebula: a vast cloud of hydrogen set glowing by a single hot, fast-moving star passing nearby — Xi Persei, a runaway blue giant lighting the gas from one side. Edward Emerson Barnard found it in 1884, and it sits about a thousand light-years away.
Some people call it a boring splash of red, and after a short session on simple gear that is close to fair — the bright ragged ridge along one edge comes up quickly, and the rest trails away flat and uniform. That is the gear talking, not the target. With a mono camera, LRGB and narrowband together, and twenty-five hours or more, the red stops being a single colour and turns nuanced and genuinely vibrant. Three to six hours will give you the shape; what is inside it is a different order of investment. It is four Moons wide either way, so a short focal length or a wide camera lens catches the whole thing, and a two-panel mosaic along the long axis is the usual answer if you cannot.
NGC 1499, captured with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 at f/4.12 and an ASI2600MM Pro camera using LRGBHSO filters
NGC 1499, captured with a 135mm camera lens and a dual narrowband filter by Cosmic Captures
I have not put a smart telescope on this one. Under a dark sky a dual-band filter gives you the outline and the ragged bright ridge, which is the part that comes easily. Four Moons wide, so a mosaic or a wide lens — and the shape is worth having on its own.
NGC 1333
Object type: Nebula
Constellation: Perseus
Apparent dimensions: 11′ × 11′
Filtering: No filter / dark skies
Recommended integration: 15h+
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Low
An entire star nursery caught in one frame. NGC 1333 sits inside the Perseus molecular cloud, one of the closest and most active stellar birthplaces to us — a churn of dust, collapsing gas, and stars only just switching on. The blue glow is not emission; it is starlight from young stars scattering off the surrounding dust, the same physics that makes a daytime sky blue. Threaded through it are small red-pink knots, shockwaves where jets from still-forming protostars slam into the cloud. Dark lanes of cold dust wind across everything, hiding the youngest stars entirely. Eduard Schönfeld found it in 1855; it is about a thousand light-years away and roughly a million years old.
It is faint and broadband-only — narrowband filters actively hurt it — so dark skies and long integration are the whole game. Fifteen hours and up is not a padded figure. What you are buying with that time is not the blue core, which comes relatively easily, but the enormous brown dust field it is embedded in, and that is the difference between a small reflection nebula and one of the richest fields in the northern sky. Few patches of sky this small hold this much.
NGC 1333, captured with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 at f/4.12 and an ASI2600MM Pro camera using LRGBH filters
About as unforgiving as this page gets. A third of a full Moon across, no smart-telescope frame from me, and nothing in its data pretends it will be quick — broadband only, a dark sky, and more than one night before the dust around that blue core has any shape to it.
NGC 891 — Silver Sliver Galaxy
Object type: Galaxy
Constellation: Andromeda
Apparent dimensions: 13.5′ × 2.5′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Very low
The Silver Sliver lies almost exactly edge-on, and a clumpy dust lane splits it along its whole length. The central bulge swells out above and below the lane, and the disc thins to faint points at both ends. It is often described as the closest thing we have to a picture of the Milky Way seen side-on from outside. Filaments of dust rise out of the disc into its halo, thought to be thrown up by supernovae, and the galaxy hosted SN 1986J, discovered on 21 August 1986. William Herschel found it in 1784; it lies about 30 million light-years away.
A darker sky and a smaller Moon pay off here, because the faint ends of the disc and the ragged edges of the dust are the first things lost. No filter. Three to six hours is the honest range, and the shape of the target makes framing matter more than its size suggests — a sliver 13.5′ long and 2.5′ wide is a thin diagonal, so give it the diagonal of the frame and leave the ends room to fade.
NGC 891, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
Small and thin in frame, and it does not matter. Under half a full Moon long, and the lane cuts it cleanly in two — that cut is the whole picture. The tapered ends are what a darker sky buys you on top of it.
IC 342 — Hidden Galaxy
Object type: Galaxy
Constellation: Camelopardalis
Apparent dimensions: 21.9′ × 20.9′
Filtering: No filter / dark skies
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: High | Southern: Not visible
A large face-on spiral, hidden behind our own galaxy. IC 342 lies close to the plane of the Milky Way, so its light crosses a thick band of dust on the way here — dimmed, reddened, and seen through a dense screen of foreground stars. That is where the name comes from. A small, warm core sits at the centre, and loose, patchy arms unwind from it in every direction. It belongs to the IC 342/Maffei Group, one of the nearest galaxy groups to our own. The distance is genuinely hard to measure because of all that dust: estimates run from about 7 to 11 million light-years. E. E. Barnard recorded it in 1890 but never published, so William Denning's 1892 report is the one credited.
Its light is spread thin across two-thirds of a full Moon's width, which is the whole imaging problem in one sentence. This is a broadband target that gains a great deal from a darker sky, and the faint outer arms are exactly where the difference shows. No filter. Three to six hours, and if the sky is good there is no point at which more stops helping.
IC 342, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50Pro smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
The core shows up early; the arms are the long game. What you are waiting for is the patchy arms and the pink knots along them coming out from behind that crowd of foreground stars. A darker sky widens them further, which is the only thing this one really wants.
M77 — Squid Galaxy
Object type: Galaxy
Constellation: Cetus
Apparent dimensions: 7′ × 6′
Filtering: No filter
Recommended integration: 1–3h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: Medium | Southern: High
The core burns bright enough to dominate the frame, and that is not just a nucleus — it is one of the closest and brightest active galaxies in the sky, a Seyfert powered by a supermassive black hole consuming material at its centre. The faint outer disc only reveals itself with time. The real subject is the contrast between the violent blazing centre and the quiet structure around it. A barred spiral seen close to face-on, one of the largest and brightest galaxies in Messier's catalogue, about 47 million light-years away, found by Pierre Méchain in 1780.
This is the most evenly shared target on the page — medium in the north, high in the south, which almost nothing else here can claim. No filter, and one to three hours is enough for a proper result, because the bright part needs very little. At seven arcminutes by six it is small, so a longer focal length helps, but the thing worth getting right is the stretch: push for the disc and you flatten the core, protect the core and you lose the disc.
M77, processed by Cosmic Captures from Telescope.Live image data
M77, captured using a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope by Cosmic Captures
The centre is there almost at once; the faint halo wrapped around it is the work. The two separate cleanly, and city light does not stop it. A quarter of a full Moon across, so expect it compact and go for the gradient.
NGC 1097
Object type: Galaxy
Constellation: Fornax
Apparent dimensions: 10′ × 6.2′
Filtering: No filter / dark skies
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: Low | Southern: High
Forty-five million light-years away, and one of the finest barred spirals in the southern sky. The bar dominates the frame, but the real story sits at the centre: a ring of star-forming regions wrapped around a supermassive black hole over a hundred million times the mass of the Sun. Material flowing along the bar feeds the ring; the ring feeds the nucleus. Four narrow jets radiate from the core — but they are not gas. They are streams of stars, the tidal debris of a small galaxy NGC 1097 swallowed long ago. The interacting companion NGC 1097A sits in the same field. Listed as Caldwell 67.
No filter and three to six hours. At ten arcminutes by six it is small, so this wants a longer focal length and a southern sky, where it rides high and the air is thin enough to show the blue knots strung along the arms. From the north it is a fight nobody wins. If you are in the south, this is one of the best things November gives you.
NGC 1097, processed by Cosmic Captures from Telescope.Live image data
The bar carries this one — at a third of a full Moon it lands small in any frame. I have not put a smart telescope on it yet, but the data is plain: no filter, no rush, and the ring of blue knots around the core is the prize.
NGC 1365 — Great Barred Spiral Galaxy
Object type: Galaxy
Constellation: Fornax
Apparent dimensions: 11′ × 6.3′
Filtering: No filter / dark skies
Recommended integration: 3–6h
Peak month: November
Altitude at peak: Northern: Very low | Southern: High
One of the largest barred spirals known — over 200,000 light-years across, roughly twice the diameter of the Milky Way, and a prominent member of the Fornax Cluster about 56 million light-years away. The bar is unmistakable: a line of older stars stretching across the disc, with arms curving north and south from its ends to form a distinctive Z-shaped halo. A second, smaller bar sits inside the first, more obvious in infrared than in visible light. At the centre a supermassive black hole feeds on material funnelled inward along the bar. One full rotation takes 350 million years. James Dunlop found it in 1826, and the Milky Way may look very similar from the outside.
Eleven arcminutes by six, no filter, three to six hours — on paper an ordinary galaxy session. What makes it worth the trip is that the structure is strong enough to survive a modest image scale: the bar reads at once, the two arms curl off its ends, and you do not need an observatory to get both. From southern latitudes it passes close to overhead. From the north, accept that this one is not yours.
NGC 1365, processed by Cosmic Captures from Telescope.Live image data
The shape survives being small, which is the useful thing here. I have not had a smart telescope on this one, but its data reads straightforwardly — a third of a full Moon in frame, no filter, and the bar with its two trailing arms is what you are going for.
The main Moon Phases in November 2026
Planning your imaging sessions? The Moon plays a massive role in what we can capture.
Here’s what’s happening this month:
Last Quarter
November 1
Deep-sky imaging is best in the first half of the night, before the Moon rises.
New Moon
November 9
The darkest skies of the month. The nights around it — roughly the 5th to the 13th — are November's prime deep-sky window, and the place to put the California Nebula and NGC 1333.
First Quarter
November 17
Deep-sky imaging is best after midnight. The Leonids peak the same night, and the Moon sets at a time that leaves the best hours clear.
Full Moon
November 24
November's full Moon is the Beaver Moon, and this one is a supermoon — the Moon reaches full within a day of perigee, about 360,800 km away, so it is a little larger and brighter than usual. A night for the Moon itself, or for the open clusters that shrug moonlight off.
The Taurids and the Leonids — November 5, 12 and 17
Three showers peak this month and none of them is a storm, but between them they cover most of November — and two of the three come with an unusually good Moon.
November 5 — the Southern Taurids. Slow, bright meteors with a reputation for fireballs, from a stream so broad that the shower is active for weeks either side of the peak. The rate is low — a handful an hour at best — but the individual meteors are worth staying out for, and the Moon is a thin crescent that night.
November 12 — the Northern Taurids. The other half of the same stream, slower still and just as fireball-prone, peaking a week after its twin under a similarly dark sky. Treat the Taurids as one long opportunity rather than two dates.
November 17 — the Leonids. Fast meteors, the kind most likely to leave a glowing train behind them, from the debris of comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. This is the brightest of the three in a normal year, though the radiant does not clear the horizon until late evening and the Moon is near first quarter — it sets early enough to leave the small hours properly dark.
For any of them, the technique is the same: a fast wide lens, a tripod, continuous exposures, and patience. None of these three needs a telescope and none of them rewards one.
Nightscape Opportunities
In the north this is the month the winter Milky Way takes over. The bright, dusty core is gone until next summer, but the band that replaces it runs from Cassiopeia overhead down through Perseus, Auriga and Orion in the east — fainter, cleaner, and much easier to photograph without a bright town ruining the bottom of the frame. Orion clears the horizon by mid-evening by the end of the month. The Taurids are the other opportunity: a fireball shower running for weeks around the 5th and the 12th, under a dark Moon both times, which is a much better bet for a single lucky frame than any of the short sharp showers. needs Tim
In the south, the Magellanic Clouds are high through the middle of the night and the galactic centre has left the evening sky, which changes what a wide frame is for. The Large Magellanic Cloud over a landscape is a shot almost nobody in the northern hemisphere can take, and November puts it where you can. The nights are getting shorter from here, so the moonless week around the 9th is worth planning around rather than waiting for.
Image by Cosmic Captures