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Geminid Meteor Shower
Target Practice writes "Is it an asteroid? Is it a comet? Who cares? According to Sky and Telescope's website, 3200 Phaethon has been spewing chunks into our atmosphere for the past 150 years, and tonight, after the lan party, you can step outside at two or three A.M. and see the best light show yet - topping off at 75 meteors per hour! Be there..." Space.com has another story.
No meteors in the Bay area.
San Francisco and friends are getting 6-12 inches of rain this weekend. Or several feet of snow if you're in the mountains. Might be a better time to go skiing or snowboarding.
The Geminids were pretty good, last year, though.
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According to the weather channel, there will be heavy blizzards across the states, so you will not be actually see the meteor shower :(.
75 per hour does not mean you will SEE 75 per hour. A lot of it depends on where you live and on the surrounding light pollution. For example where I live we could see almost no meteors but when we drove up into the mountains where the light pollution is less (and where we are closer to the meteors ;)) we could see loads.
I guess if you haven't got any mountains nearby and live in real busy place you're pretty much stuffed.
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it's growing awareness. The news would barely report it. *IF* they did it was a small blurb by the weather man or some other meaningless non-sense.
Now we have news.google.com and www.slashdot.org to tell us every last thing that happens that is of importance to dorks...
As to "are there more of these?" Nope. We have had a few spectacular shows in the past few years but nothing statistically unusual or anything more then wider reporting and slightly more accurate predictions.
Usual tips apply: Get out of the city, away from parking-lot lights, hills help block glare, let your eyes adjust, remember that a clear sky is COLD, binoculars are useless for this but entertaining for looking at other things like nebula and Jupiter's moons, look up online for tips regarding astrophotography and no your camera flash won't help...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Growing awareness... and from what I've seen, a growing tendency to announce them in news and on the web.
The same meteor showers happen about the same time every year. You can go out next year in mid-december and watch the Geminids all over again.
The only difference between them is their intensity. The Leonids, for example, has a 33-year cycle of peak activity, which is why the last two have been pretty intense.
I dug up this link with a small primer on meteor shower in general. There's probably much better ones out there.
According to the Article Peak activity is projected around 4 a.m. EST (1 a.m. PST) with ideal dark-sky conditions, at least 60 to 120 Geminid meteors can be expected to burst across the sky every hour. They will be hitting Earth's Atmosphere at 22 miles per minute.. Insane..
Do not be tempted, young skywatcher, by the fact that your northern location provides almost twelve hours of darkness. This is foolishness, and a chasing after the wind.
Heed my warning! Else you too will spend two-and-a-half hours each way driving out past the mountain range in hopes of the 'continental divide' effect providing clearer skies than the rest of the west coast. This too is foolishness, and a chasing after the wind.
Seattlites, do not be fooled by such tools of deception like "sky reports", "radar images", "high pressure areas", and "friends calling who are near there"!
Sky reports are a fabrication of your enemy. Radar images and high pressure areas are fiction created by those who sell gasoline and coffee. Your friends are already in on the deception along with NASA. And they are at home in bed.
Stay home, young Washingtonian, and get some sleep. Lord knows it's dark enough.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I used to go out regularly for showers, usually the Perseids. It's usually too cold for the Geminids.
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But after last year's Leonids, where I got a 7,000/hour rate -- 2 per second for a sustained 15 minutes -- in Japan, it's hard to go out for the regular showers again, where even witha claimed rate of 75/hour you are likely to see fewer without the best conditions.
Pictures are here and here for 2002.
Even this year's show, which got up to 600/hour at the peak,and thus the 2nd best show in my experience, was a letdown.
Of course, I missed the 1966 show, being too young. Joe Haldeman saw it and told me it was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise and watching the stars go by. He said for the first time he really could understand how he was standing on a planet moving in space.
But that was an estimated 70,000 per hour rate.
We won't see that again from the Leonids for about 97 years, if we see it then. It is possible another surprise show could come now that they are getting better at predicting, but I doubt it.
So yes, the past few years have shown an abundance of good shows. There was also a good Perseids show in the mid 90s, about 300/hour just after its comet went by. But the show is over for now, and I doubt the Geminids rate a
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As an astromoner, I'm always pleasantly pleased when I see these proto planets raining down upon us from the heavens.
This particular shower comes to us all the way from Uranus, travelling across almost the entire galaxy just to reach earth.
It's awe-inspiring.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think showers seem to be surfacing more in consciousness because of the Leonids. It's been observed that every 33 years or so, they pick up in activity. This because the Earth passes through/near the parent comet's orbit soon after the comet passes near Earth's orbit, so there's probably a higher density of ice and rock chunks. The activity was supposed to peak in '99 - '00 as it did in '66.
I've enjoyed the Geminids more than the Leonids, though, so go out to some dark skies and watch!
Orange street lights produce less light pollution.
The light is produced from a single transition in the Sodium atom, therefore the light is confined to a single wavelength and is trivial to filter.
The light from the white lights is, obviously, spread across the spectrum and is therefore hard to filter.