One Meteor Shower Coming Up

Jens Lönn writes: "The annual Giacobinid meteor shower (also known as the Draconids) peaks on October 9th and 10th. Most years the shower produces no more than a few shooting stars per hour for northern sky watchers. But there have been some impressive Giacobinid outbursts - most recently in 1998 where the maximum rate was over 500 per hour. The shower's parent comet is far away, so this year's display will probably be modest. You can see the comets orbit simulated here."

Very cool to see

[SonCorn]

I would recommend to anyone that can get out of a big city, or already lives far away from light polution, to try and see this. It is extremely interesting and an excellent opportunity to get the kids (if you have any) interested in physics, space, astronomy, etc. I find it interesting that the comet is nearly at its farthest point from the sun when we are getting hit. Earth must be moving into the path of debris that was already left behind by the comet.

More information...

[hhe_hee]

Here's some facts about how [meteorobs.org] to do if you want to look at this meteor shower. For those who really wants to read alot about this, here's an extensive guide [infoave.net] to meteor showers and their observation. They are best wieved in the late evening. The peak for the meteor shower is calculated to be today (2001-10-09) but remember that the date of maximum is approximate, viewing is possible +/- 2 days of it. The radiant at maximum will be at 262 degrees, ie. RA 17h 28.2m, Dec +54, which is about 2 degrees north of the star beta Draconis, called Restaban, on the shortest side of the head of Draco. (Need a glossary [infoave.net] or a star chart [infoave.net]?) Anyway these are slow meteors, at about 20 km/sec, so they will be very distinctive - and much easier to catch on photographs!

If you don't wanna go out to look for the showers, you can always tune in to NASA's forward scatter meteor radar system [spaceweather.com] at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. On a typical day, when there's no intense meteor shower, radar listeners will hear about one ping per minute or so. Rates could become substantially higher during a meteor shower.

Some recently updated graph of Giacobinids 2001 [nms.gr.jp] from observations shows unfortunately that they seem to be rather weak this year, just about 5-6 per hour :(. But thats not so surprising because the strength of the Draconid meteor shower has varied considerably over the years, reaching 'storm' level in 1933 and 1946 when thousands were seen and the sky looked like it was really falling! In Belgium in 1933, observers counted about 78 meteors per minute. Because of its variable nature - it's like playing on lottery when going out to observe this shower. Although chances of seeing any activity from this shower in a given year are minimal, one of these years you could be pleasantly surprised!

But there will be more meteor showers this month, for example the Orionids [amsmeteors.org] (October 21-22) which are predicted to be stronger than the Draconids (atleast compared with the observational data for the Draconids recently reported :). The Orionids are debris from Halley's Comet. Also the Leonids [nasa.gov] are coming now in November (18th) again, and this time it seems to be a big meteor shower. Actually, predictions by the world's top meteor experts expects it to be the most dramatic meteor shower in 35 years.

2018

[evocate]

I ran the JPL simulator forward to 9/20/2018 to find that Earth will tailgate the comet for several hours at a distance of about 0.25 AU. IANAA, but it seems that will make for quite a shower (if you believe in the accuracy of this simulator over 2 decades).