Rare show as meteor shower joins night sky party
Stargazers with a clear view to the east will be in luck early tomorrow morning as two spectacular night sky events combine.
A ‘‘fluky’’ coincidence means an annual meteor shower is due to light up almost the exact spot where four planets are aligning close together. The director of Napier’s Holt Planetarium, Gary Sparks, said it was rare and spectacular enough to have Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter beside each other like ‘‘mismatched headlights in the night sky’’.
From about 2am tomorrow, Eta Aquarid will join the party. Sparks said the meteor shower was caused by the Earth passing through a trail of dust and ice left by Haley’s Comet and was named as such because it appeared every year in the constellation of Aquarius.
To have both in the same spot at the same time could be quite a sight, Sparks said. ‘‘Eta Aquarid normally favours the northern hemisphere so the fact it will be in that exact part of the sky is just luck of the draw for us.
‘‘It is a pretty rare thing and I would think definitely worth getting up for.’’
The best time to view it would be from 3am to 6am, with Jupiter and Venus set to rise about 5am. Casual viewers could consider themselves happy if they saw six meteors in half an hour, Sparks said.
It was possible stargazers would see one every few minutes but space was not homogenous and, while some parts of the Haley’s Comet trail were thick and dense and brought more meteors, other parts of it were thinner, he said. ‘‘The key is to get a good view of the eastern horizon because that is the direction we are going through as we go through space.
‘‘With meteor showers it is a bit like bugs on a windscreen. And if you want to see bugs flat on your windscreen, you look at the front window, not at the back window.’’