Monday night: Tau Herculid Meteor Shower, Possible Storm
There's some talk that a usually obscure meteor shower, the Tau Herculids, may this year become a meteor storm.
For details, see EarthSky News: Will the Tau Herculid meteors produce a storm?
The Tau Herculids come from periodic Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, which in 1995, began to break up, creating lots of debris scattered across its orbit. It's hard to know exactly where the fragments ended up ... but comet experts like Don Machholz think there's a good chance that we'll be passing through an unusually dense clump of particles when we cross 73P's orbit this year.
I'm not a big meteor watcher — I find most meteor showers
distinctly underwhelming. But in November 2002, I was lucky enough to
view the Leonid meteor storm from
Fremont Peak, near San Juan Bautista, CA.
[ 17:42 May 28, 2022 More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]