The annual Quadrantid meteor shower peaks on Wednesday morning, Jan. 4th, when Earth passes through a narrow stream of debris from a comet thought to have broken apart some 500 years ago.
The shower is expected to be strong (as many as 100 meteors per hour), but elusive, with a peak that lasts no longer than a couple of hours.
The shower’s radiant near Polaris favors observers in the northern hemisphere.
The Quadrantids are often the most intense of the year’s regular meteor showers, but also one of the shortest. If it’s cloudy where you are Wednesday morning, go back to bed and stay warm — but if it’s clear, astronomers say you could see 60-200 streaks across the sky per hour.
The gibbous moon will do you the favor of setting at about 3 a.m. local time, just around the time the meteor shower peaks in the Eastern time zone. From then until dawn, the sky should be very dark, best for watching meteors. If you get up early anyhow for work, you may want to get up a little earlier than usual.
What you’re seeing are tiny particles, some no larger than grains of sand, plunging into the atmosphere at speeds of up to 90,000 mph. They typically burn up – a quick and spectacular death – about 50 miles overhead.
Be alert: most meteors streak by in a second or less, sometimes in clusters. The best way to see them is to find a nice, dark place with no street lights and as few trees as possible, and look up. You may be happiest in a lawn chair or a sleeping bag. The streaks will appear to radiate from a point in the northeast, near the handle of the Big Dipper, but they could appear anywhere in the sky.
Filed under: Meteors & Meteorites
As Neil de Grasse Tyson said; we are made of the most common elements in the universe and there are more stars than all the grains of sand in all the beaches of the world, it would be incredibly selfish to believe that we are alone in the universe.