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There's another meteor shower coming up in a week, and if you didn't get enough of them with the Perseids, you should check this one out. It's called the Aurigids, and it's supposed to be a flurry of bright and oddly colored meteors that seem to come from the direction of the constellation Auriga.
There's quite a bit of interest in this year's shower, which is the debris from Comet Kiess (C/1911 N1), because it's a rare one. Comet Kiess has only visited this end of the solar system twice in the past couple of thousand years, and so Earth rarely encounters its debris tail. This year we'll plow right through that trail on September 1. And if we're lucky, there could (emphasis on the "could") be a nice meteor shower, with perhaps a hundred meteors per hour or more, if the debris stream is thick. Or, if the debris stream is thin, the shower could be a bust.
The catch here is that the peak of the shower will be best seen by people living in the Rocky Mountains and further west. Earth will be smack in the middle of this stream at 11:36 UT (that's 4:30 AM PDT). That's the peak time; the shower (if there is one) begins well before that.(See here and here for more information.)
If you are planning to watch for Aurigids, there's a unique project brewing that you might want to be involved with: the Aurigid Laptop Meteor Observation Project. Essentially, it's another distributed computing project that will take observation info sent in by people in the observing range of the shower and turn it into a three-dimensional map of the debris stream from Comet Kiess. If you've got the time, you're in the right place, and want to make a contribution to solar system science, here's your chance.
A Perseid meteor flashing across the constellation Andromeda on August 12, 1997. By Rick Scott and Joe Orman, courtesy Sky & Telescope.com
One of the nice things about August stargazing is the Perseid meteor shower. It occurs when Earth's orbit takes our planet through the orbit of Comet Swift-Tuttle. The meteors are simply Grape Nuts cereal-sized nuggets of debris shed by the comet. The appear to be coming from the direction of the constellation Perseus. As they travel, they collide with our atmosphere and burn up on the way, leaving behind brilliant (but brief) trails of light as they go.
The folks at Sky and Telescope have put together a nice little video cartoon of meteors flashing from the radiant (the area of the sky where the meteors appear to come from) during the upcoming shower. Check it out here.
The meteor shower peaks on Sunday night (the 12th), with the numbers of meteors increasing after midnight into Monday morning. The good news is (weather permitting), the skies should be pretty dark, since the Moon won't be interfering with the view.
So, check it out. A nice August night, a clear sky, and some meteors. What's not to like?
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