Geminid meteor shower expected to be heavenly show
Flaming rocks will soon begin hurtling toward the Earth with the arrival of the annual Geminid meteor shower, one of the biggest of the year. Shox R2 Women The peak of the week-long shower will come just before dawn on Tuesday, but the shooting stars will also be visible across the world late in the weekend, says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine from the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas. Where skies are clear, the viewing will be best "before dawn on Tuesday. It starts to get light an hour before sunrise, so any time before that is going to be a good time to look," she says. Those who'd rather stay up late than get up early might want to wait until the moon sets around midnight on each of those nights during the shower. "You can still see meteors when the moon is up but it will be better when the moon has set," says Johnson. The peak will hit Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. Eastern time, 5 a.m. Central, 4 a.m. Mountain and 3 Pacific, says Johnson. Shox OZ Women "If you're brave enough to brave the frigid Arctic cold that's prevailing in most of the eastern part of the country, that's when you'll see them," says Bill Cooke, an astronomer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Ala. Meteor showers can be unpredictable in the number of fiery paths they sketch across the sky, but the Geminids are known as one of the most reliably consistent. They're expected to generate between 60 to 80 meteors an hour, "about one a minute," says Cooke. Meteors of course aren't falling stars. In the case of the Geminid shower, they're tiny pieces of debris breaking off an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon as it orbits the sun. Although the shower was first seen in the 1860s, the asteroid wasn't discovered until 1983. Though the Geminids do carry a whiff of mystery. Most well-known meteor showers, such as the Perseids and the Leonids, come from comets, which are "big, dirty snowballs," in Cooke's words. When they get near the sun, the heat turns the ice into gas, freeing some of that dirt, which is then pulled into Earth's orbit and falls through the atmosphere. As it burns up, it creates the brilliant streaks we see as meteors. But the Geminds come not from a comet but an asteroid, "a big hunk of rock," says Cooke, so exactly why it's got so much material trailing behind it to burn up in our atmosphere is unclear.Even if it is a clump of rock bits, which is one kind of asteroid, the Geminids are many hundreds of years old so those bits should have long since been lost "and yet (they are) still throwing stuff off. It's a weird meteor shower," Cooke says. It's also somewhat controversial in that some astronomers believe 3200 Phaeton to be a dead comet, a former snowball that's lost all its ice, and some believe it was just rock all along. Nike Air Jordans But what's producing the meteor showers hardly matters considering how lovely they are. For those who can't make it out Tuesday morning, the meteors will be visible for two days before the peak and a day or two afterwards, just not as plentiful. It's "a great shower that many people never see" because they come during cold weather, says Cooke. "The Perseids get all the press. It's much nicer to be out on a warm August night then to be freezing your rear in December." Cheap Jordans