illuminating science

Tonight and for the next couple of days, the Leonid meteor shower will be at its peak. Now, before you get overly excited, it’s only fair to warn you there’s only expected to be about 10 meteors an hour (plus any other random meteors that normally appear - usually 5-10). That means you’ll have to wait on average 6 minutes between each meteor. The advantage is they’re all coming from the same region of sky, which means you can just lie back and watch. A further downside is they’re up from about 1am onwards - 3am probably being a good starting point.

The Leonids occur because we’re passing through the old debris stream of a comet (the Temple-Tuttle comet, in fact!) Small dust particles left behind hit our atmosphere and burn up, just like a space shuttle on re-entry. They get so hot they glow, appearing a bright streak, before burning up completely. About every 33 years, the Leonid shower becomes massively more intense - thousands of meteors an hour! Unfortunately, the last time this was supposed to happen, in ‘99, the shower was not quite that impressive - still many meteors, but at least for the Brisbane suburbs with our darn city lights, I wouldn’t have seen more than ~ 100. That’s still a lot (!) just not thousands

Anyway, if you’re awake in the morning (really, really, early in the morning…) definitely check it out. (And drag your partner (if applicable) out of bed, too - what could be more romantic than watching meteors leave their vivid trail across the sky? (At 3am. On a Saturday morning. In the damp and cold…) )