CORFE CASTLE, UNITED KINGDOM – AUGUST 12: A Perseid Meteor flashes across the night sky above Corfe … [+]
Fall is, rather appropriately, a good time to look for shooting stars. Go out any clear night and look at the stars an hour and you’re bound to see at least one meteor flash across the night sky.
In one important way that gets slightly interrupted this weekend with the rise of the full Moon—the “Hunter’s Moon—which will be best seen during dusk on both Sunday, October 9 and Monday, October 10, 2022 as it rises in the east.
Its brightness will make feint shooting stars harder to see than in a dark, moonless sky. However, that slight disadvantage is somewhat made up for by the peaking of the Draconids meteor shower.
Appearing to emanate from a region of the night sky occupied by the constellation of Draco “the Dragon,” the Draconids can number around 20 per hour during its peak, which this year will peak on Friday, October 8, 2022 according to the American Meteor Society.
The Moon won’t help with spotting them, of course, but the Draconids are rare in that they’re just as easily seen right after dark as at any other time. That’s unlike most meteor showers, which are best viewed after midnight when the the apparent source constellation (i.e. the area of Earth’s atmosphere that the meteors strike) is overhead.
Jameson Stellar Atlas , 1822
Draco is a vast snake-shaped constellation between the Big Dipper and Little Dipper in the northern sky. It’s a circumpolar constellation that never sets. That means it’s visible all night because—like the Big Dipper—it appears to revolve around Polaris, the “North Star,” which Earth’s northern axis points at. Consequently you can see the Draconids in the north as soon as it gets dark on Friday and all night long.
All you need to do it look generally northwest (keep your back to the bright Moon and Jupiter in the east) and, with some luck, you’ll spot a Draconid, which are relatively slow-moving. Although they can appear anywhere in the night sky as streaks of fast-moving lights, if you trace those streaks back you’ll get to the northern sky.
That also means that the Draconids can only ever be seen in the northern hemisphere.
Comets leave a trail of debris and dust called meteoroids behind them as they travel through space, particularly when they get close to the Sun. When a comet’s trajectory intersects Earth’s own orbital path around the Sun it leaves behind it a stream of meteoroids that Earth will inevitably have to bust through once a year.
The Draconids’ source is a comet called 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, which in 1985 was the first comet visited by a spacecraft, the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) satellite. It was last in the inner Solar System in 2018 and will again visit in 2025, so the Draconids is a meteor shower that gets regularly refreshed.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
