Leonid Meteor Shower to Light Up the Sky This Weekend

ktla ^

[BenLurkin]

In the early morning hours on Monday, the Leonid meteor shower will send shooting stars across the sky. Look up on Saturday and Sunday night as well to spot bright meteors with trains streaming behind them.

The diminutive Comet Tempel-Tuttle will cross Earth’s orbit, creating a vaporizing shower of debris in the atmosphere. The comet takes 33 years to complete one orbit of the sun.

Typically, there are between 10 and 15 meteors per hour. Check online to see when it will be visible in your part of the world.

Unfortunately, this year’s shower won’t produce a meteor storm, which is when you can see upward of 1,000 meteors per hour. Although such an event has been associated with the Leonid meteor shower before, the last storm happened in 2001.

The best time to see the meteor showers will be between midnight and dawn on both mornings, wherever you are in the world. If you live in an urban area, you may want to drive to a place without city lights to obstruct your view.

[Buffalo Head]

Thanks for the post.

[CrazyIvan]

This means it will be overcast in Illinois. Without fail.

[struggle]

I saw the Leonids in Japan in 2001. It was cloudy until 4:30 AM, and when the clouds opened it was like the night sky had been shattered into falling fragments. Absolutely breathtaking.

[Boomer]

According that site it’s all over with. Early this morning was the end of it. At least where I am in the Southwest.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

I’ll be looking tonight, but it may be overcast.

Don’t we have these in August, too? I remember camping on the back deck with my kids in the summer and we counted 200 of them before we fell asleep!

Good memory. :)

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Old woodcuts depicting 1833 Leonid meteor storm – “the night the stars fell.”

[TXnMA]

Typical ignorant news reporting:

"The ORBIT of diminutive Comet Tempel-Tuttle will cross Earth’s orbit..."

TXnMA
  

[Larry Lucido]

The discoverer.

[TXnMA]

The shower you saw in August was almost certainly the Perseid meteor shower.

It's one of my favorites, because I don't have to drag out the arctic sleeping bag... '-)

TXnMA
  

[jmacusa]

Great. And it's solidly overcast here on The Jersey Shore.

[TXnMA]

I'm almost beginning to believe in some sort of climate change...

We left MA to retire back on "the old Home Place: shortly after 9/11/01 -- and at that time, the skies out here in the Piney Woods were so dark and clear that the Milky Way was not only visible, but dazzling!

So, one of my first acts was to call the electric co-op and have them install a cut-off switch on the mercury-vapor security light on the pole in the front yard. I enjoyed many, many meteor showers on a lounge out in the yard, or, about a half-mile "down back" in the big clearing for the firing range.

BUT -- for the last 3 or 4 years, I've not seen a single meteor shower -- any time of year -- that wasn't mostly obscured by clouds! :-(

Just went out to set up the lounge & sleeping bag -- but there's a high overcast that will probably mask all but the brightest Leonids. Add in the moon -- snd -- washout!

Something definitely has changed in Northeastern Texas!

TXnMA     :-{
  

[jmacusa]

I live here in Ocean County, NJ in a place called Bricktown. My backyard, with is quite large(my lot is 75x150) faces due east. The Atlantic Ocean is about ten miles due east of my back door, there’s no light pollution especially in the fall and winter after the shore crowd has gone and the boardwalk closes up. A few years ago on clear, moonless winter nights I could look up and make out fairly easy a ghostly trail of gas and dust of one of the spiral arms of The Milky Way. Strangely though in recent years I haven’t seen it. Puzzling.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

That’s the one! I was thinking ‘Leo’ and August, but it’s opposite. :)

[Nellie Wilkerson]

In the 1930s, Carl Carmer, a professor from New York, arrived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama to teach at the University. He was there six years, and spent a lot of time traveling the state and collecting tales that he compiled into a book titled Stars Fell on Alabama. The Foreward ends with this:

---

Many an Alabamian to this day reckons dates from “the years the stars fell” — though he and his neighbor frequently disagree as to what year of our Lord may be so designated. All are sure, however, that once upon a time stars fell on Alabama, changing the land’s destiny. What had been written in eternal symbols was thus erased — and the region has existed ever since, unreal and fated, bound by a horoscope such as controls no other country.

Let those who scorn such irrationalities explain this state that is another land in ways they prefer. They may find causes economic and sociological quite as incredible as these fables and much less interesting. But few of those who know this ground and those who live on it will deny that the curious traveler will find his journeying amply repaid here. The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California. So I have chosen to write of Alabama not as a state which is part of a nation, but a strange country in which I once lived and from which I have now returned.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015RN199K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks fieldmarshaldj.