New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The meteor shower that wasn’t
It was a fool’s errand. But all it cost me was a few hours’ sleep, plus the usual mix of hope and chagrin.
I stayed up late last Monday night, sitting in a lawn chair facing south, in hopes of seeing what maybe could have been a meteor storm — the firmament filled with falling stars.
But this is Connecticut, Home of Steady Habits and Overcast Night Skies.
When I started my night watch around 10:30 p.m. Monday night, there was clear sky above, clouds to the south and east. When I gave up, after 1 a.m. Tuesday, the cover had spread from horizon to horizon. A few stars shone through patches of haze, but only a few. I abandoned my post, locked up the house, patted the dog and went to bed.
The scene was the same elsewhere.
Monty Robson, director of the John J. McCarthy Observatory in New Milford went outside, looked up, and called it a night.
“I could see Arcturus and Virgo,” he said of two of the brightest stars in the sky in May. “But there was haze and high thin clouds. It was enough to make it not good.’’
I did see one beautiful shooting star early on, bright enough to shine through that haze. But rather than a harbinger of things to come — the grand show, which I couldn’t have seen anyway because of the blanketed sky — it was just an occasional, the kind you wish upon, no matter who you are.
Here is my only solace. The grand show, seen elsewhere, was neat, but hardly glorious. It was a meteor shower, not a hoped-for deluge.
Geoff Chester, spokesman for the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC, said people out watching did see 10 fireballs — big dramatic meteors — between 12:245 p.m. Monday and 1:15 a.m, Tuesday. That’s one fireball every three minutes, which is not too shabby.
But hundreds? No.
“It was kind of what some people predicted,” Chester said. “It was eh.’’
What raised expectations much higher than “eh” has to do with the comet that causes the late May Tau Herculid meteor shower.
The comet is Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, named after the two German astronomers, Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Wachmann, who discovered it in 1930 (It is also know, less Teutonically, as SW3)
It is a periodic comet, circling through our solar system and around the sun every 5.4 years. It’s a faint comet — never a naked-eye object — and the Tau Herculids have never been a big show.
But 1995 and again in 2006, SW-3 brightened significantly, as it began breaking up, leaving dozens of fragments in its wake. Bill Cloutier, one of the leaders of the McCarthy Observatory, photographed the 2006 fragmentation.
“There are now 66 different fragments,” Chester said of SW3
Comets are big balls of ice and dirt. As they circle the sun, its heat causes them to melt, leaving a debris trail behind. Sometimes, they fall to pieces.
When that debris — small as a sand speck — hits the earth’s atmosphere, it burns up. Get a big enough debris field and you get a meteor shower,
This May, the earth passed through the schmutz SW3 left behind after its first big break-up in 1995. It was a new debris field and astronomers predicted we’d see something on this passing. Some thought it might be a true meteor storm, with thousands of flaring meteorites. Others predicted a nothingburger.
What skywatchers did get — something — proved the basic prediction was right. SW3’s breakup in 1995 produced some serious fireballs. It was a new debris field.
“The astronomers were accurate,” said Cloutier of the McCarthy Observatory.
“It showed the people who predict these things have a good grasp of their models,” Chester said.
What did I get? Sitting out in a dark, unstormy night, I saw my first fireflies of the year — my yard’s own, yellow-green meteorites. I saw a bat fly by — a black shooting star. I heard the wind rustling by. There are worst hopeless quests to go on.
And I looked ahead to the Perseid meteor shower.
It runs from July 17 to Aug. 24. Even though its peak nights — Aug. 11-12 — will coincide with a full moon washing out some of the meteors – it is the Old Faithful of meteor showers.
There’s always some good ones. In the moonlight, I’ll reposition the lawn chair, listen to the katydids, look up and make a wish.