dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (12/12/84)
A meteor shower peaks tonight. More on watching the Geminids -- in a minute. December 12 The Geminid Meteor Shower Two showers compete for being the richest meteor shower of the year. They are the Perseids of August -- and the Geminid meteor shower, which peaks tonight. The Geminid shower is almost the only one that's worth watching before midnight. The point in the sky from which the meteors appear to radiate -- in this case, in the constellation Gemini -- is well up in the east in mid-evening. The Geminids are bold, white, bright meteors -- unlike the many-colored Perseids of August. If you want to watch them tonight, you might expect to see about one meteor every minute. But to see this number, you've got to get out in the country where the sky is dark. City lights can wash out a meteor shower -- and so can moonlight. The moon is now rising in late evening -- so you'll want to try to watch before moonrise -- again, from a place in the country. Meteors originate in comets -- but the parent comet of the Geminids was unknown until this past year. A likely candidate has now been found by IRAS, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which orbited Earth during much of 1983. IRAS discovered an object whose orbit very nearly matches the Geminid meteor stream. This object looks like an asteroid -- but it's often been suggested that comets decay to leave both a stream of tiny particles -- potential meteors -- and a dead cometary nucleus, which would be hard to tell apart from an asteroid. 1983TB is the label attached to this possible parent comet of the Geminids -- which also happens to come nearer the sun than any asteroid known. Script by Deborah Byrd. (c) Copyright 1983, 1984 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin