What is it?
Meteors are seen as shooting stars with the naked eye- tiny, bright points of light of various colours that shoot across the sky
inside a second or so. Whilst you do see random shooting stars, they usually come in showers and appear to radiate from a particular point in the sky. Meteor showers
are named after the star constellation from which they appear to come from - hence the names like Leonids - from the Leo constellation. You don’t need any equipment to see meteors - just your
natural wide-angled eyes, preferably once you have gained your night vision (up to 20 minutes after leaving a light environment). Choose your dates from the calendars of
meteor showers. A good shower can give up to 100 meteors per hour.
The Science
Meteors are simply specks of dust that hit the Earth’s atmosphere at several thousand miles per hour. The speck has
quite a lot of kinetic energy which is converted to heat as it is slowed by the Earth’s atmosphere. The specks glow incandescently and oxidise and or vaporise until they are destroyed. Larger
lumps of material may reach the ground before they are destroyed and they are then called Meteorites. Particular meteor showers occur on an annual cycle which
gives the clue to their origin. The Earth’s orbit around the sun will intersect the same region of space each year. The clouds of dust that give us meteor showers are
mostly the highly distributed tails of comets. The different colours that can be seen depend upon what the dust is made of - different elements have different spectra.
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