attention stargazers!!! Lift your eyes to the skies: Leonids to light up night
Astronomers expect meteor shower to produce once-in-a-lifetime show
By Dick Stanley
American-Statesman Staff
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
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For more on the Leonid meteor shower, see www.astrosociety.org and www.amsmeteors.org.
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The Leonid meteor shower, which begins tonight and continues through Tuesday, could be one of the most spectacular in history, according to astronomers who predict the scope of the dozen or so such celestial shows each year.
Its peak, from 3 to 5 a.m. Sunday, is expected to be a storm of up to 4,000 shooting stars an hour blazing trails across parts of North America, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Robert Naeye, editor of the Mercury magazine of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, agreed.
"We will probably never see a better meteor shower in our lifetimes," he said.
Even the hours near dawn on days before and after Sunday's peak have a chance of showing more than the usual handful of falling stars. No moonlight will interfere, but cloudy to partly cloudy skies are forecast for much of Central Texas.
Or the event might be a big disappointment. The science of meteor prediction was pioneered only a few years ago by astronomers in Australia and Ireland, and the Leonids have proved especially hard to predict.
"Everything I've seen says it's going to be pretty great," said Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine, a publication of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory. "Even as few as 800 an hour, which some are predicting, is a lot."
Meteor showers happen when Earth's nightside plows through clouds of particles as large as peas or as small as grains of sand that have been shed by icy comets heated by sunlight on their periodic excursions around the sun. The Leonid meteors, named for the constellation Leo from which they appear to radiate, come from clouds of particles left behind by the Tempel-Tuttle comet.
On Sunday morning, scientists say, the Earth will encounter the dense hearts of four clouds of debris shed by the comet in 1699, 1766, 1799 and 1866, with the 1766 cloud expected to produce the best show over North America.
Meteors hit the atmosphere about 70 miles high and quickly burn up, posing no danger to the ground, but satellites have been known to suffer electronic problems from direct hits in a meteor storm.
The only equipment necessary to see the show is a reclining lawn chair to keep your neck from getting stiff while you're looking up, a sweater or jacket against the chill, and skies as dark and cloud-free as you can find them — and no reason not to stay up after 3 a.m., when meteors usually are best.
"All of this is based on predictions developed from mathematical models built on data from previous years, so there are no guarantees," said Ed Cannon, a member of the Austin Astronomical Society. "But there's at least a reasonable chance that the predictions will be good."
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