Weekend meteor shower to be best in years

[Angie]

TORONTO - This year's Leonid meteor shower promises to be one the most spectacular in decades. The peak time will be at 5 a.m. Sunday morning, when there will be 1,300 to 4,200 meteors per hour, astronomers estimate.

Although meteor chasers in previous years have had to fly to the Gobi Desert or the Canary Islands to get the best view of the shooting stars, the orbit of the Earth this year puts North America front and centre for the show.
"It's now or never," said Robert Naeye of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific. "Astronomers don't think we'll see another storm like this one until the year 2099."

The Leonid meteors appear every year in mid-November as the Earth intersects the orbit of comet Tempel-Tuttle. Their name comes from the fact that they meteors appear to emerge from the constellation Leo. The meteors themselves are dust-sized particles left in the comet's wake.

When the Earth passes through an especially dense region of dust, the result is a spectacular meteor shower. In 1966, there were an estimated 150,000 meteors per hour spotted.

This time around, the shower will be more modest. NASA scientist Peter Jenniskens has put forward the highest estimate. He think there will be 4,200 meteors seen per hour at the shower's peak. That's more than one every second.

While amateur astronomers (and surely the pros, too) will just get a kick out of watching these dust grain burn up in the atmosphere, there is some science to be done.

Researchers from NASA, the University of Waterloo and the U.S. Air Force will be monitoring the storm from six locations. They hope to refine their meteor shower forecasts so that people who operate satellites will be able to protect their spacecraft.

We on Earth are protected from the meteors by the atmosphere, but satellites could be damaged by the dust hitting them at high speed.

The particles aren't big enough to physically damage the machinery, though. Meteors vapourize when they hit something solid, creating electrified gas that can cause shorts in the electronic components.

As well, some scientists believe meteors carried organic molecules from space to Earth billions of years ago, molecules needed for life to begin. The NASA Astrobiology Institute will be using instruments aboard airplanes to study the shower from the air.

[jutka]

Angie - are you from Toronto too?

[Angie]

No, from New York. Are you from Toronto?

[jutka]

Yep, I'm from the wonderful Toronto

[Angie]

Are you going to see the meteor shower? We are thinking going out on Sunday night from where we can watch it. Do you think we will need binoculars?

[old-reb]

Hello Angie,
Your ideas seem intresting even if you copy and paste them. My girlfriend and I are going fly to NYC on the 20th of Nov for a week. We stood on the twin towers before and now we want to see what is left of them.
old reb

[Angie]

I don't go there, I can't bare it. Just not seeing them up in the sky is painful enough, it's like missing a limb. Are you going to be here for the whole Thanksgiving week? What else are planning on doing?