Meteor showers
METEOR SHOWER VIEWING
Speeding through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour, meteor showers offer an exciting view for stargazers
I fyou enjoy gazing up at the stars on a clear night, you might have seen what looks like a point of light streaking across the sky. “Did you see that? I think I just saw a shooting star,” you might have said to a fellow observer. Technically, these are not stars, but meteors, and they are often so fast and sporadic that your companion is likely to have missed your observation.
Meteors are formed when a piece of space debris called a meteoroid, micrometeoroid or space dust burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. A streak of light can be seen when this happens due to the glow of the fragmenting object and the trail of burning particles that it leaves in its wake. Meteors can be seen racing across a clear sky during any time of the night and from any location. A single meteor is unpredictable, so spotting one often creates a wave of excitement. During certain times of the year, meteors can appear in huge groups, raining one after the other through our atmosphere in their hundreds in what are known as meteor showers.