Leonid Meteors Peak Over San Francisco Forward Of Lunar Eclipse
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Was a green fireball that recently treated at least 500 people in 13 states who happened to look up at the sky at the right time an “incredibly bright” Taurid meteor? And will the typically prolific Leonids throw out similar spectacles when the shower peaks this week over San Francisco?
The Leonid meteor shower — known to produce fast, bright meteors as Earth plows through a trail of debris left behind by the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle — peaks Wednesday and Thursday morning just before dawn.
It depends on the weather, of course. AccuWeather calls for partly to mostly cloudy.
November is always a fun month for skywatching, but especially this year. A blood lunar eclipse during the full frost moon Thursday and Friday will be the longest-running lunar eclipse of the 21st century, according to NASA (more about that later).
The annual shower runs through Nov. 30, has a cyclonic peak every 33 years and spits out hundreds of meteors an hour, something that last happened in 2001. In normal years, count on 15 or so shooting stars an hour.
A nearly full moon will be troublesome for meteor watching, but if the Leonids produce fireballs, even bright moonlight won’t blot them out. As always, the darker the sky, the better, and your best bet is to time your visit around moonset on the peak mornings — between 5 and 6 am here in California.
The much-talked-about Taurid fireball Nov. 10 was reported by nearly 500 people in 13 East Coast states. One Patch reader commented that she was “thrilled to see” the green fireball in Hawthorne, New Jersey. “So did my husband,” she wrote, “so I know I wasn’t crazy. It was amazing.”
By the way, the Taurid meteor showers—that’s plural because they consist of two distinct branches, the South and North Taurids, both rich in fireballs—continue through Dec. 10. Both streams have peaked, the North Taurids Nov 11-12, just after the green fireball was reported on Nov 10.
This week’s big event is the lunar eclipse, which will be visible in all 50 states Thursday night and Friday morning. Technically, it’s a partial eclipse but will appear from our vantage point on Earth to be a total eclipse. At the peak of this event — lasting 3 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds — our planet will block 98 percent of the sun’s light from reaching the moon’s surface in a reddish hue.
Usually, light from the sun paints the face of the moon a grayish-white. But when the eclipse peaks around 4 am Eastern Time on the 19th, the moon will be washed in a reddish hue.
A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes through Earth’s partial shadow, or penumbra, and only a portion of it passes through the darkest shadow, or umbra. A total or nearly total lunar eclipse like this one often is called a “blood moon” for this reason.
Lunar eclipses only happen during full moons. Indigenous people tracked the seasons by the full moon, and November’s is known by various names — the full frost moon, beaver moon and dark moon.
The approaching full cold moon — or long nights moon or moon before Yule — on Dec. 19 could interfere some with the Dec. 13-14 peak of the
Geminid meteor shower, but this annual sky show that rivals the Perseids in August produces shooting stars so bright they’ll be able to compete with the moonlight, according to Earthsky.org.
Multicolored meteors fly at a rate of anywhere from 50 to 120 an hour at the peak, which like most meteor showers is between midnight and dawn. The shower runs from Dec. 4-17
The final meteor shower of 2021, the Ursid meteor shower, runs from Dec. 17-26 The peak always occurs on Dec. 21, the winter solstice. The Ursids are fairly low-key, delivering five or 10 meteors an hour, but on rare occasions can produce outbursts of 100 or more meteors an hour. The meteors appear to come from the Ursa Minor constellation.
