Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Wish Upon a Star (or Three)


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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