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Geminids of 2012 by Patrick Cullis

Geminids Fireball

“During last night’s star observation at Korakio Oros, Pilida Corfu I was steering the beautiful dark nightsky when suddenly a Fireball so bright came up to the sky and scared me so much that my heart was beating like crazy, Spectacular moment! Luckily I have put my Canon eos 40D with the 15mm fisheye lens at right place at the right time.” — AstroVox//B.Metallinos

Year’s Best Meteor Shower Peaks This Week

Stargazers are about to get their annual celestial treat: A bright meteor shower, the Geminids, will grace skies worldwide this week, with a peak in activity on Thursday (Dec. 13).

Image: Astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi caught this Geminid meteor in 2009. by Babak Tafreshi

No telescope or binoculars are required to see the show — just use your bare eyes. The moon will set before the meteors come out to play around 10 p.m. local time, meaning the sky should be nice and dark for optimal viewing. There could be as many as 100 to 150 meteors an hour to gape at, for those patient enough to spend a few hours in a dark area and let their eyes adapt to starlight.

The Geminids, unusually among meteor showers, are the leftovers of an asteroid (most showers originate with comets). They are caused when rubble from the asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, lighting a path through the sky as it burns up.

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Night of the Long Leonid

A cosmic grain of sand left the long and colorful trail across this all-sky view. Its grazing impact with planet Earth’s atmosphere began at 71 kilometers per second.

Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrees)

With the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, the scene was captured on the night of November 17 from the astronomically popular high plateau at Champ du Feu in Alsace, France. Of course, the earthgrazer meteor belongs to this month’s Leonid meteor shower, produced as our fair planet annually sweeps through dust from the tail of periodic Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

The shower’s radiant point in the constellation Leo is very close to the eastern horizon, near the start of the trail at the lower left. Bright planet Jupiter is also easy to spot, immersed in a faint band of Zodiacal light just below and right of center. The image is part of a dramatic time-lapse video (vimeo here) that began only 7 minutes before the long leonid crossed the sky.

Leonid Meteor Shower of 2012 (Photos)

Leonid Over The Atlantic

Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks This Week

One of the best of the annual meteor displays will be reaching its peak this week — the annual Leonid meteor shower.

While the Leonid meteor shower has a history of putting on stupendous displays, this year will not be one of them; at best 10 to 15 meteors per hour may be seen. This year is a bit unusual in that the Leonids are expected to show two peaks of activity, one on Saturday morning (Nov. 17) and another on Tuesday morning (Nov. 20).

In the public mind the term “meteor shower” conjures up a vision of shooting stars streaming through the heavens like rain. Such meteor storms have indeed occurred, when tens of thousands of meteors per hour flare into view. But most showers are a thousand times weaker.

Watching one consists of lying back, gazing up into the stars, and waiting. A very good shower will produce about one meteor per minute for a given observer under a dark country sky. Any light pollution or moonlight can reduce the count considerably.

This year the moon will not be a problem for the Leonid meteor shower. It will set well before the constellation Leo, where the meteors appear to radiate out from, climbs high into the sky.

Aurora & Orionid over Abisko National Park, North Sweden by Carmen Sánchez García

Orionids

Meteor, Moon and Milky Way

This shot was taken at -5C° on a windy night in Paso de San Francisco, Argentina. On the left you can see El Nevado de Incahuasi, a volcano with a height of 6.638 meters. On the right there’s Nevado Ojos del Salado, another volcano with a height of 6.864 meters.

Millky way, Auroras & Meteor

Orionid Meteor via Oklahoma

Orionid Meteor Shower Wows Weekend Stargazers

The Orionid meteor shower is raining bits of the famed Halley’s Comet on Earth this weekend to the delight of stargazers around the world.

The 2012 Orionid meteor shower peaked early Sunday (Oct. 21), with forecasters predicting up to 25 meteors an hour for patient stargazers with clear skies well away from city lights. Based on accounts sent into SPACE.com, the meteor shower did not disappoint.

In Norway, photographer Tommy Eliassen captured a spectacular view of the Orionids and Earth’s dazzling northern lights.

Orionid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight: How to Watch Online

The Orionid meteor shower will rain bits of Halley’s Comet on Earth tonight in a promising weekend “shooting star” display. You can even watch the celestial fireworks online if bad weather spoils your local view.

The 2012 Orionid meteor shower will peak early Sunday (Oct. 21), but should still be an impressive sight throughout the overnight hours of late Saturday, NASA scientists say. The space agency will stream live meteor shower views from an all-sky camera at its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

“Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, the source of the Orionids,” meteor expert Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour.”

NASA’s live view of the Orionids begins tonight at 11 p.m. EDT and ends at 3 a.m. EDT on Sunday (0300 to 0700 GMT). The space agency will provide a Ustream feed of the Orionids from its all-sky camera, as well as a web chat with astronomer Mitzi Adams to answer reader questions. You can access the webcast and video stream here at 11 p.m. tonight: http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/orionids2012.html