AUSTIN (KXAN) — One of the best meteor showers of the year, the Geminid meteor shower, is here. The star fall event peaks Saturday night, Dec. 13, with over a hundred meteors falling every hour.
“It’s one really good shower that’s kind of more bedtime friendly for kids,” Lara Eakins, public outreach coordinator for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, said.
The peak shower will appear to the east, coming out of the Gemini constellation, between 8 and 9 p.m. Saturday, and will last through the night.
Meteors began falling on Dec. 4 and will continue until Dec. 20, but this weekend will be your best chance to see them.
“It comes regularly because the Earth is actually passing through a point in its orbit where it goes through a debris stream that’s left behind by the parent body of this particular shower. Now, for most meteor showers, it’s a comet that does that, but the Geminids are weird. They actually have a parent body that seems to be more like an asteroid than a comet,” Eakins said.
That asteroid, Phaethon, orbits our sun. It goes a little beyond Mars and then between Mercury and the Sun. Phaethon is also blue, rather unusual for an asteroid. The asteroid may be a remnant of another blue asteroid, Pallas.
According to Eakins, the best way to see this shower is to get away from city lights and look East around 10 p.m. Eastern Time. The event should be visible right near Jupiter, which will be extra bright this weekend.
Eakins described the meteor shower like driving in snow, when “all of the snowflakes appear to be coming out in all directions around you.”
“There’s that same effect, you know, it’s that they’re streaking all around you,” he explained.
Later that night, the moon will rise in the east and will make it hard to see the meteor shower. At this time, look to the west so you can see the meteors zip toward their final destination.