LUMBERTON — Late Saturday into early Sunday will be the best time frame to view the 2018 Leonid meteor shower, according to Kenneth Brandt, the director of the Robeson Planetarium.
He said the shower comes annually and is dependable in its timing and can potentially be visible for days in the late-autumn sky, depending on weather and location. Skies are forecast to be clear this weekend.
“Look straight up later in the early morning hours to watch for the brightest meteors speeding by at the rate of 60 meteors an hour in one of the major meteor showers of the year,” Brandt said.
The Leonid meteor shower is named after the constellation Leo, which is located in roughly the same point of the night sky where the Leonid meteor shower appears to originate from. In late autumn or early winter, that means viewing the spectacular light show with eyes pointed straight up in the night sky.
Leonids are pieces of debris from Comet Temple-Tuttle, basically an icy skeleton of a comet that lost most of its outer covering of ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Each November, Earth passes through the debris cloud left by the comet as sand-sized specks enter the Earth’s atmosphere, producing a spectacular show of “falling stars.”
Leonid meteors tend to be few and far between at early evening, but intensify in number as evening deepens into late night. The waxing quarter moon will set at late evening, leaving dark skies for this year’s Leonid meteor shower. Leonid meteors are bright. The shower favors Earth’s Northern Hemisphere.
“As a frequent meteor shower watcher, I find it best to turn off all interior and exterior house lights. This is a wonderful way to see that the Earth is always moving,” Brandt said. “In this case, it’s the revolution of the Earth that’s on display. The comet particles are moving much more slowly than the Earth’s motion around the sun, so that’s why the meteors appear to be moving so fast”
Brandt suggests being outdoors for at least 15 minutes — mostly to allow eyes to adjust.
“No special equipment is needed,” he said. “What a great event for the whole family to see.”