Geminid meteor shower 2013: Watch it live, right here
The Geminid meteor shower peaks on Friday night, and you can watch the show live, right here.
The live broadcast, brought to you courtesy of the website Slooh.com, was slated to start at 2:30 p.m. PST, but there was some weather interference making it difficult for its Canary Island telescope to see anything at all. The site says it will switch to streaming live footage of the shower from a telescope in Chile at 4:30 p.m. PST.
The Geminid meteor shower is one of the most prolific of the big, annual meteor showers, and also one of the strangest. When viewing conditions are ideal, it is possible to see between 100 and 140 meteors per hour. However, this year the Geminid peak coincides with a nearly-full moon. Because the light of the moon will drown out some of the dimmer meteors, sky watchers can expect to see between 40 to 60 meteors tonight.
The best time to see the meteor shower not online is around 4 a.m. after the moon has set but before the sun has started to rise. For the best viewing, get yourself to the darkest sky you can find and remember to give your eyes about 45 minutes to adjust to the darkness.
The Geminid shower occurs each year as the Earth passes through a stream of debris that appears to be left in the wake of a rocky, asteroid-like body called Phaeton 3200. This makes the Geminid meteor shower unusual. Most meteor showers are caused by debris left in the wake of comets.
Scientists do not fully understand how Phaeton 3200 caused all that debris in its orbit. It doesn’t have a tail, and it doesn’t seem to be shedding much dust and rock as it moves through space.
“The Geminids are my favorite because they defy explanation,” said Bill Cooke, who heads up NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, in a statement. “Of all the debris streams Earth passes through every year, the Geminids are by far the most massive. When we add up the amount of dust in the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500.”
The bits of dust and rock hit Earth at about 22 miles per hour and burn up in our planet’s atmosphere, causing the streaks you see in the night sky.
We may not understand it, but we can still enjoy it.
There are great things to see in the night sky! Follow me on Twitter for more like this.
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