The annual Leonids meteor shower is only a few days away. The meteor shower will peak in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 17 and again on Wednesday, November 18th. The Moon will be just past new, so we should have a really dark sky for seeing dozens of shooting stars.
And just what are meteor showers? As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet’s orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighborhood of a constellation. The upcoming Leonids meteor shower is named for the constellation Leo because the shooting stars seem to appear from there.
If you can’t get away from city lights to see the meteor shower, you can always take an outing to an observatory to view the stars. Or maybe you have a planetarium nearby and can go inside for a show of the night sky. Here are a few observatories and planetariums that I found:
Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum Chicago, IL
Keeble Observatory Ashland, VA
Planetarium at New Jersey State Museum Trenton, NJ
Skywalk Observatory & Exhibit Boston, MA
Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA
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