Hard Rain of Geminids
Written by The Night Sky Guy on December 14, 2009 – 10:37 am -
It’s the morning after the Geminids peak and early observati0ns from last night’s maximum are coming into the International Meteor Organization now and folks are reporting an average peak of 156 shooting stars per hour at peak time around 12:15 am EST. Check out the chart in my blog post below to see how the Geminid rate rocketed up overnight – exactly as predicted. Looks like meteor shower forecasting is really coming of age . With counts like that there is still a great chance to see more meteors tonight – not at those amazing numbers – but still decent at 20 to 20 per hour, maybe more. So if you can, head outside tonight and see some shooting stars!
When is the next great meteor shower? The annual Quadrantids on January 3rd usually supplies over 100 per hour. More on this new year show in a few weeks.
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Tags: Geminids, meteor shower
Posted in Meteors | 3 Comments »
By Daniel Fischer on Dec 14, 2009 | Reply
I’d recommend waiting at least a day or two before deciding on how good the predictions were: The IMO ZHR profile is notoriously unstable in the early hours after a meteor shower has peaked. Just witness what happened to the Leonids this year: At first it seemed the peak was well above a ZHR of 100, now it’s clearly below …
By The Night Sky Guy on Dec 14, 2009 | Reply
True indeed I gree, my impressions are that the IMO reports tend to be overly optimistic early on, but unlike what some reports at the time were touting, I remember that there was never a storm prediction just an outburst. Researchers tell me that final numbers when averaged out with more inexperienced observers and ones that do not get ideal atmospheric conditions inevitably push the final mean lower than what the intrinsic fall rate really is.
My understanding is that meteor forecasting is still in its infancy and researchers have admitted to me during my interviews with them that many times their predictions for timing are pretty much dead on, but it’s knowing what the rates will be, that they are still working on getting better at. Still I find it so amazing that they can model meteor streams at the accuracy level they do today. As a science geek and skywatcher I find this whole science so very cool!
By Daniel Fischer on Dec 14, 2009 | Reply
The IMO’s ZHR profile seems to consolidate – with the surprising outcome that the peak may have been as high as the most optimistic predictions (i.e. around 150) but NINE HOURS EARLY, i.e. around 20 UTC on the 13th instead of 5 UTC on the 14th. Perhaps this will change with more data coming in – but if not this might be considered a major setback for meteor modelling.
And an incentive for further work, of course; in the case of the Leonids that a lot of people have worked on, the timing of the peaks has been very good ever since the breakthroughs in 1999, and it’s only the peak height that’s being re-calibrated year after year. So I’s say that meteor predicting has reached adolescence in recent years – including occasional rough cases …