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A Geminid meteor caught in its last moments of fire.
POT
The 2020 Geminid meteor shower is officially past its prime, but an impressive display should still await sky watchers venturing Monday night and early Tuesday morning.
The official peak of the Geminids came Sunday night into early Monday morning, and it definitely delivered plenty of shooting stars and some bright, slow-moving fireballs from my icy, dark-sky location in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But ideal new moon conditions continue Monday night and Tuesday morning, and there should still be plenty of meteor activity to see.
the Perseid The meteor shower gets a lot of attention because it is active during the warm summer nights in the northern hemisphere, but the Geminids are actually the strongest most years.
Even better, this is one of the few major meteor showers that doesn’t require you to wake up long before sunrise to see the best part. According to the American Meteor Society (AMS), the Geminids provide “good activity before midnight, as the constellation Gemini is well placed from 10pm onwards.”
This simply means that the celestial region from which the meteors will appear to emanate is located high up in the sky early in the evening. It will be at its highest around 2 am local time, but leaving before midnight still gives you a good chance to see a lot. Also, those hours are the best time to see slow, bright “land rodents” along the horizon.
“I like to look south and have the radiant drift west across my field of view. This also allows me to monitor minor showers that are active in the same region of the sky,” says AMS’s Robert Lunsford.
Bottom line: there is no bad time to search for Geminids. Besides, you don’t need stare at Gemini to see the Geminids. Meteors can appear anywhere in the night sky, but they will normally move far of Gemini.
Photos of the 2020 Perseid meteor shower glow brightly in a dark year
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If you can handle that, all you need to do is dress appropriately, lie down, let your eyes adjust, relax, and observe. Geminids can range from faint, fleeting “shooting stars” to bright streaks of intense colors and perhaps even a fireball here and there. You will have a better chance of detecting meteors in the northern hemisphere, but the Geminids are also visible south of the equator, later in the evening and in fewer numbers.
We get meteor showers when the Earth drifts through clouds of debris, often left behind by visiting comets. In the case of the Geminids, the debris comes from the so-called “rock comet” 3200 Phaethon, believed to be a potentially extinct comet that roams the inner solar system.
