Meteor Showers

Nick Davison writes: "This weekend promises another good meteor display with the Perseids expected to be falling at up to one a minute at around 6am PST Sunday morning. The big show of the year, however, is expected to be the Leonids that peak November 18th - they are expected to briefly peak at around 15,000/hour."

Comments

Re:Won't see it

[b0r1s]

How bright would it be anyway? I'm on the west coast, and it SHOULD be clear then, but the show will be competing with sunrise in California, and I'm assuming it will be pretty much impossible to see it here. Anyone know otherwise?

Re:Will this cause problems for the ISS? - NO

[Lord_Pall]

IANOMS(I am not a meteor scientist) but...

Not to challenge your meteor scale statement, but last time i checked, even a grain of sand going at meteor type speeds will cause significant damage..

They've got a piece of a shuttle windshield that got nailed by a piece of paint down in houston at the johnson space space center..

Nothing quite like seeing a fleck of paint embedded 2 inches into a "bulletproof" windshield..

Re:Will this cause problems for the ISS? - NO

[Wizard of OS]

No, it wil not. Meteors you see are actually be little grains of sand, I doubt those will have an impact on ISS. On the other hand, meteor observations is a piece of astronomy that can easily be done by amateurs but that does have scientific value: new models are generated based on the observations, and these models help predict meteor showers (so that solar panels of sattelites can be turned if huge amounts of spacejunk is expected). The perseids are relatively small, members of my local observatory saw 13 in 5 hours yesterday (okay, it was partly clouded). With a huge meteor shower as the predicted leonids (they were predicted to shower enourmously for the past few years, but I didn't notice any of that), things may be different for ISS.