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Take in a celestial shower this week without mosquitoes

This week you can catch one of the best meteor showers of the year over Marshall. It’s the annual Geminid meteor shower, and if the clouds stay away it should be a good one this year because the moon will be mostly out of the sky.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth runs into a debris trail of dust and small pebbles as it orbits around the sun. For most meteor showers the debris is left behind by a passing comet, but the Geminids are unusual because the debris trail was left behind by an asteroid dubbed by astronomers as 3200 Phaethon. This asteroid was discovered in 1983 and is thought to have a diameter of around three miles. It has a highly elliptical orbit that swings it by our part of the solar system every year and a half. Each time it passes it refreshes the debris trail. It’s a real cosmic litterbug!

Oh and by the way, 3200 Phaethon is not one of those killer asteroids that’s expected to bash into the Earth someday, at least not for now. Eventually, though, a large asteroid will hit the Earth, maybe in 10 years, 100 years, or several million years from now. Who knows? An asteroid or comet that hit the Earth 65 million years ago wiped the dinosaurs out and cleaned the slate for life forms on Earth.

Enough destruction talk! Getting back to the Geminid meteor shower, it will peak Wednesday and Thursday morning but should be pretty good. If you’re lucky enough to be in the countryside or make the effort to travel there you may see well over 50 meteors an hour and maybe even 100! Even if you’re challenged with suburban light pollution you’ll see enough of them to make losing a little sleep worth it. Some of these meteors are slamming into our atmosphere at over 40 miles a second. These bits of dust and pebbles get incinerated at altitudes anywhere from 40 to 60 miles up. Most of the light you see from meteors, though, is not because of combustion but from how they temporarily destabilize or excite the small column of air they’re charging though. That’s why you see meteors as streaks in the heavens, and some of the streaks stay visible for a second or two after as the atoms and molecules get their act together again and stabilize. Meteor streaks can also be different colors depending on what kind of gases they run into, how large they are, and how fast they’re moving. In general the reddish tinged meteors tend to be slower meteors and faster meteors are more bluish.

This shower is called the Geminid meteor shower because all of the meteors from our vantage on Earth appear to be coming from the general direction of the constellation Gemini the Twins, which starts out the evening in the eastern sky and by morning twilight it’s stretched across to the low western heavens. By no means though should you restrict your viewing to the immediate part of the sky around Gemini because the meteors will be all over the heavens. I don’t want you to miss any! The best thing to do is to be well layered in clothes, coats, and blankets and lay back on a fully reclining lawn chair, rolling your eyes all around and keeping count of how many meteors you see. Meteor shower watching is especially fun with a group of people, because the more sets of eyes you have patrolling the sky the more meteors you’ll see. Dress warm and enjoy the show!

If you’re out in the very early morning chill checking out the Geminids that super bright “star” in the early morning low eastern sky after 5 a.m. is Jupiter, about 577 million miles from Earth right now. The next brightest star you can see just above Jupiter has a reddish glow. That’s actually Mars, about 195 million miles from our backyards. Late next July Mars and Earth will separated by just less than 36 million miles, the closest it’s been since 2003. It’ll be quite a show!

On the mornings of the Geminid peak on Wednesday and Thursday mornings the waning crescent moons will be hanging around Jupiter and Mars just above the eastern horizon. You’ll like what you see!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net.

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