Greetings to the Geminids, year’s best meteor shower
Folks willing to endure some cold and stay up past their bedtimes are about to be treated to the annual Geminid meteor shower this week, expected to one of the best of the year.
“Not only is it the year’s most prolific, with up to 120 meteors per hour visible from rural skies, the moon is essentially out of the picture,” Sky & Telescope magazine says.
This pre-Christmas display of celestial fireworks will reach its peak during the long, dark hours from Wednesday night into early Thursday, Space.com reports.
“With August’s Perseids obscured by bright moonlight, the Geminids will be the best shower this year,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s meteoroid environment office. “The thin, waning crescent moon won’t spoil the show.”
The Geminids are named for the constellation Gemini, the point from which the meteors seem to radiate.
The Geminids are active every December when Earth passes through a massive trail of dusty debris shed by a weird, rocky object named 3200 Phaethon, Cooke said. The dust and grit burn up when they run into Earth’s atmosphere in a flurry of “shooting stars.”
“Phaethon’s nature is debated,” Cooke said. “It’s either a near-Earth asteroid or an extinct comet, sometimes called a rock comet.”
The asteroid has a debris trail in orbit around the sun, and once a year, Earth runs into this dusty path, which intersects our planet’s orbit.
Geminid meteors are bright and fast
(79,000 mph), and the shower is famous for producing fireballs, which are meteors brighter than magnitude
-4, the same magnitude as the planet Venus. According to Sky and Tele
scope, the Geminids are behind only August’s Perseids when it comes to fireballs.
Meteor showers don’t require binoculars or telescopes to view — just your bare eyes. To increase the chances of seeing meteors, choose a site at least 40 miles from a major city, Astronomy.com says.
The best viewing conditions on Wednesday night will be across the southern and western USA, where cloud-free conditions are expected. But bundle up: Some of the coldest temps of the year are expected that night, AccuWeather says.