Another exciting show of the heavens will unfold tonight as the Geminid meteor shower peaks early Tuesday, between midnight and sunrise New Jersey time. The best viewing time for the Geminid meteor shower will be around 6:00am. There will be around 50 to 120 meteors which will illuminate the night sky every hour. Set your gaze at the Gemini constellation.
Unlike other meteor showers which are mostly from the tails of a comet, the Geminid metor showers are produced by rocky celestial leftoevers. The Earth passes through the stream of debris every December. This debris is produced by 32000 Phaethon which was once believed to be an asteroid and is now considered as an extinct comet.
You can also check out the website of NASA tonight since they will be hosting an online chat with astronomer Bill Cooke. Cooke will be taking qyestions during the online chat.
Geminid meteor shower 2010 started to be visible December 12 and will be illuminating the sky until December 16. People will see the meteor shower along the Gemini constellation specially on a very clear night sky.
The Geminid Meteor Shower however is not the only celestial event this month since on December 2010 and wee hours of December 21 there will be a total lunar eclipes. It will be the only full lunar eclipse of the year and the entire event will be visible in North America, Central America, a bit of South America, Greenland and Iceland.
A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth’s surface. Intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which may produce greater than 1,000 meteors an hour. Because meteor shower particles are all traveling in parallel paths, and at the same velocity, they will all appear to an observer below to radiate away from a single point in the sky.
This radiant point is caused by the effect of perspective, similar to railroad tracks converging at a single vanishing point on the horizon when viewed from the middle of the tracks. Meteor showers are almost always named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. This “fixed point” slowly moves across the sky during the night due to the Earth turning on its axis, the same reason the stars appear to slowly march across the sky.
The radiant also moves slightly from night to night against the background stars (radiant drift) due to the Earth moving in its orbit around the sun. See “IMO” Meteor Shower Calendar 2007 (International Meteor Organization) for maps of drifting “fixed points.
For More InformationMeteor Shower Tonight visit Nasa website
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