As quickly as it started, 2019 will soon be in the history books. I for one am happy to see it go. A cloudy and rainy spring, hot and humid heat waves during the summer, then the EEE mosquito threat have conspired to prevent casual stargazers and amateur astronomers alike from enjoying the night sky and all the wonders it holds. It would be great if we could end the year on a high note, but the sky gods are not smiling down on us for December.

Though the Geminids are the best meteor shower of the year, peaking on the night of December 13-14, the Full Moon on the 12^th will overwhelm all but the brightest meteors. To complicate matters further on the peak night, that bright moon will be sitting right in the middle of the Gemini constellation. While you won’t require my usual star map to find Gemini, the proximity of the Moon to the region of the sky from where the meteors appear to radiate (near Gemini’s brightest stars, Castor and Pollux), will certainly reduce your meteor count. .

However, one does not have to look directly at Gemini to catch a few of the brightest shooting stars. In fact, the Geminids are fairly bright and also have a reputation for producing exploding meteors called fireballs, My point: if the weather cooperates on peak night do not give up on the Geminids. You might just glimpse a few bright Geminids as they enter our atmosphere at 21.75 miles per second.

May Meteor Shower

   It’s challenging to explain to someone that you spent a below-freezing December night sitting on your back porch bundled up in a sleeping bag on a lounge chair just to watch a few meteors blaze across the sky. Why? Because sometimes even I question why I choose to do so. A few months back the Geminid meteor shower did not perform well around here, at least not when I decided to observe it. After about an hour and a half I counted less than a dozen meteors, and not all of them were Geminids. Only a couple of them were bright enough to elicit a wow, though not loud enough to wake my neighbors!

    That’s the way it is with meteor showers. Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time to see the meteors to best advantage. Other times you are not. It can be frustrating when the latter occurs, especially when the weather conspires against you. Still, after all my decades of stargazing I never tire of watching for meteors to fall from the sky.

    The early days of May present us with warmer weather prospects to enjoy a somewhat “meteor-ocre” display of shooting stars. During the pre-dawn hours of May 5 and 6, the Earth will be sweeping through a stream of particles shed by Halley’s Comet long ago. (Either morning will be a fine time to observe since the Eta Aquarids do not have a sharp peak. The meteors comprising this meteor shower enter the Earth’s upper atmosphere head-on at 41 miles per second. While the Moon will not interfere with observing this shooting star display this year (New Moon is on the 4^th), one can expect to see no more than 10-15 swift and yellow shooting stars per hour from Southern New England. Why? The Eta Aquarids, are best observed from the southern hemisphere.