April 7, 2012

Meteor Showers of 2012


I normally do a post about the meteor showers of the year because it's lovely when reenacting events are schedule for the same weekend. It's purely magical to lay on your back in your work dress and watch the fire smoke swirl up to the sky and see the brilliant meteors shower down.
 








Reenactments are a great time to witness meteor showers because the are typically in big fields and sometimes are removed from cities and other bright lights. You can see more stars in general at events, but a meteor shower is just amazing. 

Meteors are frequently called "falling stars" but they really are just debris left behind by comets. The debris granules can be the size of a sand grain or as large as a boulder and are known as meteoroids until the reach the Earth's atmosphere and heat up. The trail that the meteorite follows through the atmosphere is a meteor and if a meteor doesn't burn up and hits the Earth, intact, it becomes a meteorite. 

Showers of 2012 

-Lyrids (April 21-22)
-Eta Aquarids (May 5-6)
-*Lyrids (June 14-16)
-*Delta Aquarids (July 28-29)
-Capricornids (July 29-30)
-**Perseids (August 12-13)
-Draconids (October 8-9)
-*Orionids (October 21-22)
-**Taurids (November 5-12) 
-**Leonids (November 16-18) This meteor shower is particularly brilliant every 33 years. In 1833 the shower was estimated to have over 100,000 meteors an hour. Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass both witnessed this shower.
-**Geminids (December 12-14)

* Indicate a more brilliant shower.  

I hope everyone is lucky enough to get to see a shower or two this year. One of the best ones is in December, unfortunately it isn't as pleasing to witness due to the cold. The summer showers are very relaxing and enjoyable to watch. It's not something people think about when planning an event. I never thought about it until I went to an event and saw one. Has anyone gotten to witness a shower at an event?















6 comments:

  1. I hope we get to see some during the warm months. It's hard to sit out and watch when it's cold at night! That was a fun New Market. :)

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    Replies
    1. That was pretty cool. I hope we get to see one again.

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  2. Replies
    1. There's one coming up! You have to get out of the city though.

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  3. My dad and brother have observed a few here in the UK within the last month. Can't see any at the momment with all the cloud cover, though!

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  4. What Dad always said we needed is an East Coast-wide blackout like the one the tri-state area had in the early 1960's. If a national power grid failure coincided with a once-every-fifty-years meteor shower. That's on my list of 1001 events I want to witness before I die.

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