This year, the Geminid Meteor Shower will peak on the night of 13-14 December, and is thought to make quite a show on the night sky, or as astronomers David Levy and Stephen Edberg would say, 'if you haven't seen a Geminid fireball, then you haven't seen a meteor'.
This particular meteor shower gets its name from the Gemini constellation, from which they seem to have originated, as seen from the surface of the Earth on the night sky, from a general area
near the Castor star in the constellation. At the same time, the Red Planet finds itself in the Gemini this month, shining brilliant yellow-orange hues, as it is slowly approaching Earth, and will probably attract great attention from enthusiasts, turning their eyes towards the Gemini constellation in the following week.
Usually, the Geminid Meteor Shower is the most satisfying of all the others, surpassing the event of the famous August meteor shower, Perseids, being well recognized through its bright, slow meteors and faint meteors, while they are less richer in medium brightness objects. This meteor shower is produced as a result of an asteroid passing in close vicinity to the Earth, 3200 Phaethon, and not by a comet as common sense may imply.
This object, which is thought to be the burned out nucleus of a comet, captured into a close orbit around the Sun, and on December 10, it will make the closest pass by Earth at a distance of 18 million kilometers. This would be the closest approach to our planet, since that which took place in 1983, when the asteroid was discovered.
Debris left behind by its pass will enter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 35 kilometers per second, lighting bright without visible tails, and will be about four times denser than the meteors which usually fall down to the surface, and produce divided paths.
However, while last year's meteor shower was somehow shadowed by the moon's quarter phase, the conditions this year appear to be remarkable, as the moon will be in the new phase in the night of December 9, and will set somewhere around 8 p.m., ensuring a dark moonless sky. Calculations used to predict the peak activity indicate the night of December 14, at 16:45 GMT, meaning that the best places to view it will be in the east part of Asia, and across Alaska, when meteor rates will exceed 120 per hour. Nevertheless, this high activity presents only about 6 to 10 big meteorites.
As the planet passes through the debris trail, the meteor rates will increase in a steady rate three days before the maximum, which could present about one quarter of the activity during the peak, and will drop sharply after including renegade meteors that could appear even a week after the event. This also enables the possibility to view the so-called 'Earth-grazing' meteors, which have trajectories almost parallel to our atmosphere. However, these bright long grazers follow a path right across the sky, and might end in a point just below the horizon.
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