November, according to NASA and my cloud cover
I keep a printed list of the month's sky events on the fridge. This month I have also been watching NASA JPL's two-minute "What's Up" video for November, which covers the same ground with better graphics. I did not make it and have no connection to it; it is just a useful summary.
The first item is Mars and Mercury close together low in the south-west just after sunset on the 12th. I went out at ten past five yesterday and saw nothing but the roof of the house behind ours and a lot of orange sky. From here both planets were very low and very faint in the twilight, and I suspect you needed a flat horizon and good binoculars. Neither is available at my back step.
The Leonids are next, peaking around the 17th, with the radiant in Leo rising late in the evening. They are usually a modest shower and I will treat them as a reason to be outside rather than a target. The last segment, from about 1:40, is about Saturn's rings, which are tilted so nearly edge-on to us this month that they all but disappear. I looked at Saturn on Sunday at 70× and saw a planet with a thin bright line through it, and a shadow that confused me until I worked out what it was.
The aurora I did not see
On the night of the 11th and into the 12th there was a severe geomagnetic storm, and people a long way south of the usual aurora zone saw red skies. I know this because I was told about it the next morning. My sky was a uniform grey ceiling of cloud from dusk to dawn, and I went to bed at half past ten without looking.
While feeling sorry for myself I found this NASA Goddard video about STEVE, which I had heard of but never understood.
STEVE is a thin purple or mauve ribbon that stretches across the sky, east to west, sometimes with a row of green streaks under it like a picket fence. Amateur aurora watchers in Canada photographed it and gave it the name; scientists later fitted it with the long form, Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. The point the video makes, around the one-minute mark, is that it is not an aurora. Aurorae are caused by charged particles raining down into the upper atmosphere. STEVE is a river of very hot, fast-moving gas, and it glows for a different reason.
I like that the people who found it were standing in fields with cameras rather than sitting in observatories. I also like that it was named after a cartoon. Next storm, I am looking out of the window before I go to bed.