How To See Tonight’s Meteor Shower [View all]

[Sherman A1]

If you can drag yourself out of bed and into the chill of a early January morning, you might find yourself looking at a rare treat: the Quadrantid meteor shower. Early in the morning hours of January 4, from roughly 2 to 5 a.m. local time across the country, this annual meteor shower will be visible in the Northern hemisphere, peaking with an intensity that will approach 100 shooting meteors per hour.

“What’s going on is the earth is going through a debris trail,” says Timothy Spahr, astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “You’re dealing with very tiny particles, dust-sized in a lot of cases. When they enter the atmosphere, they burn up immediately, and that makes a meteor.” The particles that make up the Quadrantid shower originate from an asteroid named 2003 EH1, which many scientists believe was actually once part of a comet. Because the particles enter at speeds as high as 90,000 miles per hour, they burn up high in the atmosphere and leave a glowing streak across the sky.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/01/how-to-see-tonights-meteor-shower