As the nights get longer, the stargazing gets that much better – Twin Cities

Stargazing this time of year is getting a lot easier becausethe nights are now a lot longer than days. Secondly with the end of Daylight Saving Time last weekend, it’s dark enough for stargazing by 6 p.m.!

Despite all that, this week’s best stargazing is in the early morning two to three hours before sunrise. Who wants to go to bed early and set the alarm for 3 or 4 in the morning? You’ll want to for this week’s great show going on in the early morning heavens, that is if the clouds don’t photo bomb the sky. Fix yourself a big cup of coffee, bundle up, grab a lawn chair and blankets, and prepare to be dazzled. The show’s even better in the darker countryside, but even if you have to compete with city lights, it’s worth getting up for.

When you first get out, just sit back in a lawn chair or lean up against your car and let your eyes get use to the darkness. You can’t help but be blown away by the great stellar show going on in the early-morning southern skies. The fantastic winter constellations overwhelm that part of the sky. This is where “Orion and his gang” hang out. Orion the Hunter and his surrounding gang of constellations — Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins and others — gradually shift from the south to southwest sky as you approach morning twilight. I never get tired of seeing those great celestial characters. Even though it isn’t quite winter, Orion and his posse are considered winter constellations because in January, as the Earth continues its orbit around the sun, these bright shiners will be seen in the early evening sky, so consider viewing them this week as a preview of great evening stargazing to come.

To get to know these constellations, download a good January evening star map. You can find a good one at skymaponline.net and set for early evening sometime in January. Make sure you use a red filter flashlight to see the map so you don’t ruin your night vision. Of course there are many great stargazing apps for smartphones available. My favorite is “Sky Guide.” On that app you can turn the screen on your phone red to maintain night vision.

While you’re taking in the loveliness of all the bright stars in the early morning hours, you’ll also see some stars shooting across the celestial dome. They’re not actually stars but meteors ripping into our atmosphere. Later this week and especially this weekend, you’re bound to see a more meteors than normal. That’s because the annual Leonid meteor shower will be peaking. The Leonids are not the best meteor shower of the year, but I would put them in the upper tier. What makes them attractive this year is that there’s no moonlight in the early morning hours, making for a much darker backdrop to catch those “falling stars.”

Annual meteor showers like the Leonids occur when the Earth in its orbit around the sun plows into debris left behind by a comet. Comets are more or less “dirty snowballs” of rock and ice that orbit the sun in highly elliptical elongated orbits. When their orbits take them close to the sun, they partially melt leaving a debris trail made up of tiny particles from the size of dust grains to small pebbles about the size of small marbles.

The comet that fuels the Leonid meteor shower is called Temple Tuttle, which last came by this part of the solar system in 1998 and won’t return until 2031. The Earth in its solar orbit is busting into this trail from Temple Tuttle at 66,000 mph, and at the same time, these individual comet debris particles or bullets are whizzing along in their orbit at thousands of miles an hour as well. This means that the debris can crash into our atmosphere at speeds over 150,000 mph!

With that kind of speed, individual particles quickly burn up due to tremendous air friction, but the light we see isn’t because of the combustion. It’s impossible to see that because these tiny particles are burning up anywhere from 50 to 150 miles high. The streak we see is the glowing column of air being chemically excited by the particle that’s ripping through it. Sometimes these streaks appear to be different colors, which indicates the kind of atmospheric gas that is temporarily being aroused.

Meteor showers are best seen after midnight, because that’s when you’re on the side of the rotating Earth that’s plowing into the comet debris. It’s kind of like driving cross county on a warm summer night. You get more bugs smashed on your windshield than you do on your rear window. After midnight, we’re facing the “windshield” of the traveling Earth.

The Leonid meteor shower is not named after the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. They’re called the Leonids because the meteors seem to emanate from the sky where the constellation Leo the Lion is poised. After midnight, Leo hangs in the eastern sky and looks like a backward question mark. That doesn’t mean you should restrict meteor hunting to just that area of the heavens. If you do you’ll miss many of them because the meteors can show up anywhere in the sky.

The best way to watch for the Leonids, or any other meteor shower, is to lie back on a lawn chair with blankets sometime after midnight, preferably after 2 or 3 in the morning, roll your eyes all around the night sky and see how many meteors you spot in a given hour. It’s a fun group or family activity.

CELESTIAL HUGS