Geminids Meteor Shower
 | Author:
Jeff Ross
Contributor |
Geminids Meteor Shower Jeff Ross The Geminids meteor shower is one of the most reliable meteor showers of the year. The Geminids start on December 6 with one or two an hour and peak on December 14 with upwards of 100 meteors per hour. They are pretty much done by December 18.
Unlike most meteor showers, the Geminids do not originate from the passage of a comet through our solar system. They originate from 3200 Phaeton, an asteroid with a roughly year and a half-orbit around the Sun.
3200 Phaeton gets closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid. At its closest, 3200 Phaeton is roughly 13 million miles from the Sun. That is less than half the distance that Mercury ever gets from the Sun. At that point, the surface temperature of 3200 Phaeton is well over 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Geminids are so named because the radiant point in the sky where meteors appear to originate is in the constellation Gemini. Like every other meteor shower though, meteors will appear flashing across the night sky in almost all directions. If you trace the trajectory of a specific meteor back, it will appear to be from Gemini, if it is a Geminid.
The Geminids are best seen between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. At that time the constellation Gemini is high in the sky to the southeast. The Geminids are slow meteors and are often yellowish in color. Fireballs, similar to the one I caught on my automated aurora cam (mt43news.com/005), are not uncommon.
The only downside to the Geminids, here in Montana, is that the wee hours of the morning in the middle of December can be brutally cold. Braving the cold is worth the effort to see 100 meteors an hour though!
With clear skies, of course.
