The Leonid meteor shower, one of the better meteor showers, peaks in the early morning sky from after midnight to the start of morning twilight. The constellation Leo, the great lion in the sky, will be coughing up streaks of fire moving at speeds over 40 miles per second
If you’re in the countryside away from heavy city lighting, you may see more than 20 meteors or “shooting stars” an hour, but there’s always a chance you’ll see even more. While this shower isn’t as great as the Perseids in August or the Geminids coming up in December, conditions for this year’s Leonids are favorable because the skies will be nearly moonless after midnight. Last year there was a last quarter half moon in the predawn hours that washed out much of the meteor show.
You’ll be able to see the Leonid meteor shower most of this coming week, especially in the early morning hours Wednesday. You might see some meteors before midnight but you’re better off waiting until after midnight. If you have the discipline to set your alarm at 2 a.m. and get outside, that’s great, too.
This week Earth will be in the maximum debris trail left behind by Comet Temple-Tuttle, which last visited this part of the solar system in 1998. Meteor showers occur when the Earth, in its orbit around the sun, crosses into debris trails left behind by comets. Every time a comet swings close to the Earth and melts a little, particles are released, mostly the size of dust grains but some a little larger than pebbles. Meteors in a meteor shower are best seen after midnight, because that’s when you’re on the side of the rotating Earth that’s plowing into the comet debris. It’s kind of like driving cross country on a warm summer night. You get more bugs smashed on your front windshield than you do on your rear window. After midnight we’re facing the “front windshield” of the traveling Earth.
The trail of debris strikes our atmosphere at speeds from about 20 miles a second to over 40 miles a second. That kind of speed generates so much air friction that the tiny particles are quickly vaporized. There is just about no way they can reach the Earth. But you may be wondering, how can particles not much bigger than pebbles cause such bright streaks of light? It’s certainly more than just combustion. In fact, most of the light that you see from meteors is caused by the materials traveling as fast or faster than speeding bullets, temporarily ripping apart the atomic structure of the column of air they are traveling through. Many times it takes a second or two for the atoms and molecules to get their act back together once a particle passes. That’s why the meteor trail can remain visible for a few moments after it completes its unsuccessful journey toward Earth’s surface. Sometimes you’ll also see different colors in the meteors, depending on how fast they are coming in and what kind of gases they are coming through.
These meteors are called the Leonids since they seem to emanate from the constellation Leo the Lion in the eastern sky after midnight. That’s because Leo the Lion happens to be in the same direction in space where the debris trail and the Earth’s atmosphere are colliding. Meteors will spread out in all directions from Leo, the constellation that looks like a backward question mark. That makes Leo the radiant of this meteor shower.
That doesn’t mean that you should restrict your meteor hunting to the area around Leo. The meteors can show up anywhere in the sky, but their tail will seem to point back in the direction of Leo. In fact, the best way to watch for the Leonids is to lie back on a lawn chair after midnight, preferably after 2 or 3 in the morning, roll your eyes all around the night sky and see how many meteors you can spot in a given hour.
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