The weather outside is frightful here in Colorado, but tomorrow
night, December 13, I’ll be sitting on my front porch after midnight wrapped in
a down sleeping bag watching for meteors shooting from the direction of the
constellation Gemini. On Thursday night/Friday morning, after midnight, is when
the Geminid meteor shower peaks in North America, with the sky flashing up to
eighty meteors per hour. Don’t give up if you are an early bird, though, because
Gemini rises at about 7 p.m., and you may see “shooting stars” every hour even
tonight, December 12, and as late as December 18. I’m hoping to see one on my
run tonight. If you are impatient, though, and don’t want to depend on the possibility
of seeing that once-per-hour shooting star, you’ll want to stay up after
midnight. The new moon that rises tonight will render tomorrow’s shower clearly
visible and a simultaneous potential meteor shower as yet unidentified by
scientists will add up to thirty meteors an hour, rendering the sky awesome (in
the old-fashioned sense of the word).
The possible unidentified shower—it’s not a sure thing—will come
the sky from Wirtanen’s orbit in the direction of Pisces, and although as
Deborah Byrd writes (http://earthsky.org/space/new-meteor-shower-might-coincide-with-2012-geminids),
it’s probably not important to know whether you are seeing meteors illuminating
the sky from the direction of constellation Pisces or that of Gemini, I think the
contrast as Pisces sets in the west while Gemini rises in the east with meteors
emanating from both directions simultaneously will provide a brilliance I’ve
never seen.
If you want to identify the constellations, I like the Sky
Map app. And, if you want to know more technical details about meteors and the
showers themselves, NASA will be holding a live chat all night December 13, at
its site http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/watchtheskies/index.html
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