Meteor Shower coming for East Lancs
Posted: 18 Aug 2015, 09:35AMATEUR star-gazers who got a taste for the twilight last week have been told there will be another free spectacular in the skies about East Lancashire this winter.
Onlookers in the Midlands and the North had the best view of hundreds of shooting stars in the night skies as the annual Perseids meteor shower peaked last Wednesday.
The Perseids had been keenly anticipated this year as they coincided with a new moon, creating the ideal dark sky conditions, and they were also briefly joined overhead by a bright man-made star, the International Space Station.
Dr Joanne Bibby, a lecturer in Astrophysics at Lancashire’s Jeremiah Horrocks Institute, says there will be another meteor showers in December, the Geminids.
These are associated not with a comet but with an asteroid – the 3200 Phaethon – which takes about 1.4 years to orbit around the sun.
The Geminids are considered to be one of the more spectacular meteor showers, with up to 100 meteors per hour at its peak.
Dr Bibby said: “With a new moon providing the darkest skies and an optimistic weather forecast, expectations of this year’s Perseids meteor shower were high and stargazers were certainly not disappointed.
“If people got a taste for astronomy from the Perseids then I encourage them to view the Geminids meteor shower on December 13/14.
“Again the moon is favourable and should produce dark skies, so potentially we could see 50-100 meteors per hour.”
Meteors are the result of particles as small as a grain of sand entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burning up
http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/ne ... e_s_skies/
Onlookers in the Midlands and the North had the best view of hundreds of shooting stars in the night skies as the annual Perseids meteor shower peaked last Wednesday.
The Perseids had been keenly anticipated this year as they coincided with a new moon, creating the ideal dark sky conditions, and they were also briefly joined overhead by a bright man-made star, the International Space Station.
Dr Joanne Bibby, a lecturer in Astrophysics at Lancashire’s Jeremiah Horrocks Institute, says there will be another meteor showers in December, the Geminids.
These are associated not with a comet but with an asteroid – the 3200 Phaethon – which takes about 1.4 years to orbit around the sun.
The Geminids are considered to be one of the more spectacular meteor showers, with up to 100 meteors per hour at its peak.
Dr Bibby said: “With a new moon providing the darkest skies and an optimistic weather forecast, expectations of this year’s Perseids meteor shower were high and stargazers were certainly not disappointed.
“If people got a taste for astronomy from the Perseids then I encourage them to view the Geminids meteor shower on December 13/14.
“Again the moon is favourable and should produce dark skies, so potentially we could see 50-100 meteors per hour.”
Meteors are the result of particles as small as a grain of sand entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burning up
http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/ne ... e_s_skies/