Shallow Thoughts : tags : meteors

Possible (but unlikely) Leonid Show; Made a Repo for TuxMeteor

Salon.com had an article predicting a rare Leonid show on Friday and Saturday night this week: Rare "outburst" meteor shower will be visible this weekend.

I'm not sure where they got that idea; more science-leaning resources, like Universe Today and Science Alert, say 2024 is an "off" year for the Leonids, with an expected Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of 15-20 meteors per hour even with ideal conditions, which we don'e have because of an almost-full moon.

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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 2001 (I think that's the right year), I was lucky enough to view the Leonid meteor storm from Fremont Peak, near San Juan Bautista, CA.

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