If it's clear where you are, bundle up, head outside and look
up. One of the best meteor showers of the year will peak on 13
The Geminid meteor
shower, which returns every December as the Earth passes
through a debris trail from asteroid 3200
Phaethon, is usually one of the year's best celestial shows.
Overnight, and peaking just before dawn, you may see one or two
shooting stars per minute under clear dark skies. Even in areas
with a lot of light pollution, the brightest meteors should be
clear and sharp.
Part of what makes the Geminids so spectacular is that they
travel more slowly than meteors from other showers. They can take
several seconds to blaze across the sky, and sometimes leave a
brief trail of glowing smoke.
The Geminids get their name because they appear to fly from near
the stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini. From the
northern hemisphere, Gemini is in the eastern sky in the evening
and high overhead after midnight.
Other famous meteor showers, like the Perseids in August and the Leonids in November, have been observed for hundreds or
thousands of years. But the Geminids showed up suddenly in the
1860s. It took astronomers another 120 years to figure out that the
asteroid 3200 Phaethon was the shooting stars' source. Most meteor
showers are linked to the debris left in the wake of a comet, but
the Geminids were the first to be connected to an asteroid,
suggesting that 3200 Phaethon may actually be an extinct comet.
To check when the best viewing times are in your area, check out
calculator applet developed by two meteor hunters at the SETI Institute.