Leonid Meteor Shower this weekend!!!
Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 7:13 pm
NASA wrote:On Sunday, Nov. 19th, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. The result: a shower of Leonid meteors.
"We expect an outburst of more than 100 Leonids per hour," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. This pales in comparison to the Leonid storms of 2001 and 2002, when sky watchers saw thousands of meteors. Even so, a hundred per hour would make the Leonids one of the best showers of 2006.
The problem is, you have to be in the right place at the right time to see them.
Earth's encounter with the comet dust is going to be brief—"possibly no more than a few hours long," says Cooke. Forecasters differ on when the outburst will occur. Estimates range from 0445 UT to 0630 UT on Nov. 19th (11:45 p.m. on Nov. 18th to 1:30 am EST on Nov. 19th). The timing favors western Europe, Africa, Brazil and eastern parts of North America.