November turns Bangladesh's sky around. Saturn, which ruled October's evenings, now sinks into the southwest soon after sunset, and everything else worth looking at — Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury — has moved to the hour before dawn. The month's one unmissable event, the Leonid meteor shower, peaks on the night of 17-18 November, and this year the moon gets out of the way at almost exactly the right moment.
The Leonids, and why the timing is unusually kind
The Leonids are debris from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle and arrive every year in mid-November. In an ordinary year they deliver ten to fifteen meteors an hour — no storm, but the fastest meteors of any annual shower. They enter the atmosphere at roughly 71 kilometres per second, which makes them bright, brief and often tinged green or blue.
What decides whether a shower is worth leaving the house for is usually not the rate but the moon, and this year the arithmetic favours Bangladesh. The moon reaches first quarter at 5:49pm on 17 November, and a first-quarter moon sets around local midnight. The radiant — the constellation Leo, which the meteors appear to stream away from — clears Dhaka's eastern horizon at 11:57pm and climbs steadily until it is highest at 6:18am, which is sunrise.
Put those together and the usable window is roughly half past midnight to a quarter to five: no moon, radiant rising, sky fully dark. Shower peaks often fall beside a full moon and are effectively cancelled. This one does not, which is why it is the date to keep.
The technique is unglamorous. Lie back and take in as much sky as you can rather than staring at Leo — meteors appear all over the sky and only seem to radiate from one point. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt and do not look at a phone during them, because one glance resets the adaptation. Leave the binoculars indoors: they narrow the field of view, which is the opposite of what this needs.
Saturn in the evening, everything else before dawn
Saturn is the last bright planet in the evening sky, low in the southwest after sunset and setting a little earlier each night as Earth pulls away from it. A small telescope still finds the rings, though they sit far narrower to our line of sight than before the ring-plane crossing of 2025, when the rings turned edge-on to Earth.
The morning sky is where November is busy. Venus returns as the morning star, low in the east before sunrise, reaching its greatest brilliancy on 29 November. Mars is not far away and brightens week by week. Jupiter sits in Leo, rising late in the night and still building toward its opposition on 11 February 2027. Mercury makes its one decent appearance of the month, at greatest western elongation on 20 November.
Around 14 November all four — Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter — stand in the morning sky together. Mercury is the hard one: it stays low, and from inside a city it will be lost in the haze along the horizon.
Uranus reaches opposition on 25 November, which sounds better than it is. The full moon falls on the 24th, so the one night Uranus is closest to us is also one of the brightest nights of the month. The first week of December is the better attempt.
The moon, and two sets of fireballs
The moon runs last quarter on 2 November, new on 9 November, first quarter on the 17th and full on the 24th. The dark nights are therefore 7 to 11 November, and that window carries its own reward.
The Taurids peak twice — the southern branch around 4-5 November, the northern branch around 11-12 November. The rate is low, perhaps five an hour, so they are easy to dismiss. They are worth the wait anyway, because Taurid meteors are slow and often extremely bright: this is the shower that produces fireballs big enough that people report them as explosions. One good Taurid is worth an hour of faint ones, and the new moon on the 9th sits neatly between the two peaks.
What it means in Bangladesh
November's move to the morning sky changes who can realistically see any of this, and it works in this country's favour more than it might elsewhere.
Astronomical dawn in Dhaka arrives around 4:55am through the middle of the month, with sunrise near 6:13am. That leaves a genuinely dark hour overlapping the time a great many households are already awake for Fajr. Unlike a 2am meteor watch, the planets cost no sleep — a few minutes on a roof or in a yard before the light comes up is enough for Venus and Mars, and Dhaka's air is at its clearest in that hour, before traffic starts lifting dust into it.
The less convenient fact is that the observing season is closing from the north. Dense winter fog settles over Rangpur, Dinajpur and Panchagarh from late November and stays into January — and those northern districts are exactly where the darkest skies are. The country's best observing sites lose the season first, while hazier Dhaka keeps a usable sky for longer. Anyone planning to travel north for the Leonids should go on the 17th rather than wait for a clearer-looking week.
A word on what is realistic. Ten to fifteen meteors an hour means one every four or five minutes, and they arrive unevenly — three inside a minute, then nothing for a quarter of an hour. The people who enjoy these nights treat them as time spent outside rather than a show with a timetable. October's Draconids made the same point at a fifth of the rate.
On what else is crossing overhead, see the thirty-eight-year-old satellite that broke apart in a busy orbit.
Moon phases here are given in Bangladesh Standard Time, and the rise, set and twilight times are computed for Dhaka (23.81°N, 90.41°E). Elsewhere in the country they shift by a few minutes — later in the west, earlier in the east.
