Even December will not be poor in beautiful celestial phenomena. The Geminid meteor shower will light up the sky. And according to astronomers, during the period of their maximum, it pays to look for meteorites all night.
Astronomers promise that the Geminids have ideal viewing conditions this year. Their maximum falls on the night from December 14 to 15. Specifically, it will occur at 8:00 p.m. just a few hours before the culmination of Gemini.
“The moon does not interfere at all, it will be in the new moon only three days before the maximum and sets like a narrow crescent even at dusk,” they reported on website experts from the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
And according to experts, it pays to look out all night, especially in the second half of the night and early in the morning, that is, between midnight and four in the morning. That’s when the constellation Gemini peaks and the swarm is shortly after its maximum. “Under ideal conditions (of course, observing far from cities) over 400 meteors can be caught during the maximum of the shower,” the astronomers said.
“If there is already a blanket of snow somewhere, don’t let the cold betray you and try to spend at least a few moments under the sky. The ‘shooting stars’ over the ‘Ladova landscape’ are truly a fairytale experience,” experts advise.
The parent body of the Geminid swarm is the planet Phaeton. Astronomers claim that this is probably a former and now extinct comet. At the same time, the radiant cluster is located east of the two brightest stars of the constellation Gemini, the stars Castoor and Pollus. “In the December sky, they rise already in the evening twilight and during the night they rise high above the southern horizon, where they peak after midnight,” the experts concluded.
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TN.cz
2023-12-02 04:45:00
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