“You'll have to stay up late to see Geminids Meteor Shower - Star-Press”

You'll have to stay up late to see Geminids Meteor Shower - Star-Press

Posted: 01 Dec 2010 03:03 PM PST

If you're planning to step outside next week to see the Geminids Meteor Shower, Ron Kaitchuck offers these words of comfort.

Leave your hard hat in the house.

"They almost never reach the ground," assured the Ball State University professor of physics and astronomy, discussing those flashy objects that are also colorfully, though inaccurately, known as "shooting stars."

What's more, even if they do reach the ground, they aren't exactly going to bean you, being the size of a grain of sand.

Though the meteor shower will likely begin within a week, Dec. 14 will be the best night to observe it.

"It peaks on the 14th," Kaitchuck said, remarking on their appearance. "They seem to be flowing from the constellation Gemini."

The best place to observe the shower, he continued, is a dark site with a minimum number of trees to obscure one's view.

As for the best time to observe it, while you might see some celestial action earlier in the night, later is better.

"It doesn't get really good until after midnight," the professor said, noting that by then, the light of the moon is less of an obscuring factor.

By the way, he added, don't expect to see much if you go scooting back into the house after just three or four minutes.

"You're not going to see them that way," he said.

Under ideal conditions and with some perseverance, you will observe about 100 meteors a minute.

That's not exactly a veritable snowfall of meteors, nor can it compare to the Leonids Meteor Shower, with which Kaitchuck is very familiar, having observed its ultimate density, when it "goes nuts" every 33 years.

"But this is still a pretty good shower," he said.

Snow comparison

In another way, he noted, the analogy with a snowfall works for this one, since the meteors are coming in the same sort of head-on pattern as you commonly observe driving through a snowfall, Kaitchuck said.

By the way, while you are not going to be injured by being struck by a meteor, Kaitchuck offered this fascinating fact about them, which should be good enough to win you a bar bet if anybody believes you.

Their tendency to burn up in the atmosphere notwithstanding, taken globally, the mass of Earth increases by 100 tons a day from the meteors that do make it to our planet's surface.

They are, by the way, commonly space effluvia, the cast off stuff of comet tails that we pass through on our way through space.

Sound impressive? Highfalutin? Awesome and humbling and cosmic?

With just a few words, Kaitchuck brings the explanation for meteors down to Earth.

"I sometimes call them comet droppings," he said with a laugh.

Contact John Carlson at 213-5824.

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Wednesday, December 1, 2010