Skygazers could get quite a show early Tuesday morning.
The Leonid Meteor Shower peaks this year on November 17th. The shower begins on Tuesday morning at around 4a.m. with a sprinkling of 20 to 30 meteors per hour over North America.
The new Moon provides ideally dark conditions for viewing this initial flurry.
Leonids are bits of debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Every 33 years the comet visits the inner solar system and leaves a stream of dusty debris in its wake. Many of these streams have drifted across the November portion of Earth's orbit. Whenever we hit one, meteors come flying out of the constellation Leo.
A remarkable features of this year's shower is that Leonids will appear to be shooting almost directly out of the planet Mars.
It's just a coincidence. This year, Mars happens to be passing by the Leonid radiant at the time of the shower. The Red Planet is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star, so it makes an eye-catching companion for the Leonids: sky map.
So if this sounds like your kind of entertainment...set the alarm and enjoy!
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement