Leonid meteor shower peaks under dark skies this weekend

The meteor shower Leonid, always reliable, reaches its peak on Sunday morning, 18 November. Once the increasing gibbous moon sets a little before 2 am, observers will have more than three hours of observation time without being disturbed until dusk begins to paint the sky. For the best show, observers must travel as far as possible from the city – artificial lights drown the weaker meteors and make the brightest less impressive. Under rural skies, people with good eyesight should see an average of 15 to 20 meteors per hour.

The Leonid meteors seem to radiate from a point in the Lion constellation (hence the name of the shower). This group of stars gets up in the late evening and rises very high in the southeast at dusk, shortly after 5 am. High speeds mean that they produce a higher percentage of fireballs – meteors at least as bright as the glittering planet Venus – than most showers.

Leonid meteors begin life as part of a comet called 55P / Tempel-Tuttle. This comet returns to the internal solar system every 33 years. Whenever it approaches the sun, the heat of our star warms the icy core, turning the ice into gas and releasing trapped dust particles. The dust spreads along the orbit of the comet and every year in November, the Earth flows into this stream. When dust particles enter the upper atmosphere of our planet, they burn away to create the flashes of light we see in the sky.