Get ready for a double celestial event this week.November’s full beaver supermoon will peak at 8:19 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac. But the silvery orb will be below the horizon at that time, so take the time to look outside during the evening hours for the best view.The moniker beaver moon marks the time of year when beavers begin preparing for the winter by fortifying dams and lodges and stocking up on food. This full moon is also referred to as the digging moon by the Tlingit people, deer rutting moon by the Dakota and frost moon by the Cree, according to the almanac.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis lunar event will be the second of three back-to-back supermoons this year. A supermoon happens when the moon reaches perigee, or its nearest point to our planet, making it appear larger and fuller.“It’s so subtle that the human eye does not pick up the superness of it. But we still give it a fun name, I guess, to indicate that technically, this is the moon at its biggest and brightest, just not that much bigger on average than it usually is,” said Dr. Alissa Bans, director of undergraduate studies of Emory University’s department of physics.If clouds obscure the view in your area, the Virtual Telescope Project will share a livestream of the full moon over Manciano, Italy, beginning at 2 p.m. ET Wednesday.Keep an eye out for fireballsThe second celestial event this week is the Southern Taurid meteor shower, which will peak at 8 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to EarthSky.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis meteor shower does not have a strong peak — there may only be five meteors an hour, said Robert Lunsford, fireball report coordinator for the American Meteorological Society. “But anytime it’s dark in that period (October through early November), you’ll be able to see these slow meteors coming from the constellation of Aries in October and Taurids in November.”The Taurids are the result of Earth’s passing through debris left by the small comet 2P/Encke. It has the shortest orbit of any comet that’s been discovered — just 3.3 years, compared with long-period comets that have orbits lasting between 200 and 1,000 years. In previous years, this meteor shower has produced fireballs during Halloween, so they’ve also been called the “Halloween fireballs.”“The entire encounter with Taurids this year is special because we’re predicted to encounter some fresh material …
