A meteor shower, seen for the very first time, could become a meteor storm tonight between 2 and 4 AM Eastern Time, the Washington Post reports.
The meteor shower known as Camelopardalids, derived from the dust of Comet 209P/LINEAR, discovered in 2004, will begin at about 10:30 PM Eastern Time on Friday, May 23, and build quickly by about 2 AM, scientists at the US Naval Observatory say. “The general consensus is that this week’s Camelopardalids will be comparable to a very good Perseid meteor shower with an added possibility of a storm,” the paper quoted Geoff Chester, astronomer at the US Naval Observatory, as saying. “I’m planning to be out watching.”
Shooting stars will likely be visible until dawn, when the sunrise will wash them out. They’ll come out of the constellation Camelopardalis, which is near the North Star, Polaris, and runs from the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor, to Perseus in the northern sky, passing directly between the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia’s recognizable “W” shape.
So, find some place to camp out and look up, with your feet pointing north. It could be quite a show! Viewing will be best in the northwest portion of the North American continent, according to the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeral Calculations in France.
A word of caution about the prediction: Earth has never encountered this stream of dust before tonight. The display could be anything from a complete dud to a spectacular storm of hundreds of slow-moving bright falling stars per hour. “We’re going right smack in the middle of these dust trails, and the meteors are going to be pretty slow,” University of Arizona astronomer Carl Hergenrother said in a NASA interview, according to a report on Reuters.
Comet 209P/LINEAR is about seven and a half million miles away from Earth tonight, and the debris left is not necessarily expected to be on Earth’s path every year as it is tonight. But for this year, the Earth is expected to crash into the debris.
Pieces of debris, usually ice chunks with sizes between that of a seed and a grape, cause the shooting stars as they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. They are occasionally the size of boulders, but even those usually burn up in the atmosphere as they fall to Earth, beginning when they’re about 90 miles above the Earth’s surface and ending when they’re still about 60 miles up.