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EVENT:
The annual Geminid meteor shower
DATES: Thursday night and Friday morning, December 13 and 14; plus any dark nights that week.
BEST OBSERVATION TIMES:
10 pm on Thursday the 13th through 2 or 3 am on the 14th.
DIRECTION: The whole sky, overhead and toward the south.
EQUIPMENT: Lawn chair and warm clothing or even a sleeping bag.
Some intrepid observers regard this as a good test of a hot cocoa recipe. Telescopes or binoculars are not useful for meteor-watching but they can bring in marvelous views of Jupiter, the Pleiades, or the Orion Nebula.
While most meteor particles are the cast-off debris of comets, the Geminids appear to be dust shed by an asteroid.
Every December, the Earth passes near its orbit and runs into some of that dust.
The Geminid meteor shower is one of the year’s best regular events, and one of the most consistent.
It is not as well known as the Perseid shower in August, mostly because the weather — either cloudy and cold, or clear and
really cold — makes watching it much less comfortable.
Most predictions have the 2012 Geminid shower peaking near midnight on the night of the 13th/14th.
The Geminids are relatively slow and often very bright and, as the name suggests, they appear to radiate from a point above the twin stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini, high in the southern sky.
Because the moon is new on the 13th, there should be little glare to wash out the fainter meteors.
For best observing, pick a dark spot well away from streetlights or houses and allow several minutes for eyes to adjust to the dark.
It could be a great night with the Milky Way arcing overhead, Jupiter and the Pleiades high in the southwest, Orion in the south, and quite possibly the best meteor shower of 2012.
Keep looking up!
- Bob Hamlin
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