salutations celestial sight seers i'm david fuller welcome to eyes on the sky what's up this week
i tend to avoid talking about some of the minor meteor showers like the eta aquariids
and some other ones just because they don't really produce a lot of meteors maybe 15 to 20 per hour
which means at best you would see one every three to four minutes under ideal conditions at the peak
under dark skies so i try to focus on the ones that are really good ones and even though the
perseids are warm uh when they occur in august and the geminids coming up here in just a couple days
it's colder weather the geminis actually produces more meteors per hour than the perseids does so
it's a really great one to be able to see let's talk about why this one is producing so many
meteors and why it's actually producing more and that's partly because it happens to be associated
with an asteroid called 3200 phaethon you can see its orbit here it goes well outside that of where
mars is at it goes well inside mercury's orbit and passes close to the sun and as it comes back
around and leaves a lot of that bits of dust and sand and whatever else off of the comet as it uh
gets cracked from getting so close to the sun it leaves all that in its orbit as it kind of
goes through our orbit and then when we plow through that we see meteors as they burn up
into the atmosphere now this particular object is kind of interesting because this was taken by the
arecibo radio observatory which unfortunately just had a catastrophic incident which means they're
going to be closing it down so we're fortunate we have these but these are uh basically different
radio images of how this particular um asteroid looks and it's about 5.8 kilometers in diameter
so it's decent sized but still small for us to be able to see that however because it is this
asteroid not really a comet as it goes close to the sun it kind of gets uh heated up it gets up to
perhaps a thousand degrees or more uh and then it cracks and leaves all these
objects behind and so when it orbits we start to see meteors in the sky now the geminids are
going to appear to radiate from a point not too far away from where the star caster is
in the constellation of gemini so you can find that below capella and to the left of where orion
is if you're in the northern hemisphere if you're in the southern hemisphere uh you're going to have
a a different view of that for sure but for most of us that are watching we will be able to see it
radiate from here but you don't want to necessarily look right at there really what
we tend to do is we're going to look outside of there so if i bring up our angle measuring
tool if you look uh maybe 30 to 50 or 60 degrees beyond there out in this area this is where you're
gonna probably see more of those meteors is out in this direction so if you we look here like this uh
we can see that we're we would be really looking almost up overhead so just get a comfortable chair
you're going to want to definitely dress warm because you're not really going to be moving a lot
what i find works well is maybe a sleeping bag and a blanket it might actually help to put um
a blanket underneath you because that as you uh compress that insulation under you as you
sit uh you'll actually be colder from the back than you will be from the front where you have
more fluffier layers to keep trapped the air above you so maybe put another layer or two underneath
where you are and then you can just look up uh you might want to face towards the east northeast
in general and start looking ideally at about 10 p.m or so uh but if you do need to look earlier
than that because we'd be going from basically a sunday into a monday that's okay because it's
december 13th into the 14th and the 14th is the monday but we want to start looking on the 13th
and then just look up you don't need any optical aid you don't need binoculars you don't need a
telescope if you want to use binoculars you can to try to look at some of the
trails as they may occur but mostly you're just trying to just see as much of the night
sky as you possibly can at once and look for those meteors as they streak across the sky
and the geminids are quick they're faster than the perseids are they're also maybe
not quite as bright just because of the type of debris that 3200 phaethon leaves but this
is an easy naked eye event you can enjoy with the entire family everyone just bundle up get outside
get a nice chair where you can lean back and look up at the sky and enjoy as much as you can and try
to get away from as many lights as possible too because that will definitely help the darker the
area that you're able to be or block lights that's gonna assist you in seeing more of those geminids
so that's all for this week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down
so we can all see what's up i'm david fuller wishing you clear and dark skies