October 5, 2016 7:59 pm

The Draconid Meteor Shower Peaks October 7th – A StarTalk Viewing Guide

This guest blog post is by StarTalk intern Kirk Long. Kirk is majoring in physics while minoring in mathematics and piano at Idaho State University.

On the evening of October 7^th, 2016, the Draconid meteor shower will reach its peak. Although the Draconids usually only produce a few, slow-moving meteors each hour, it is famous for occasionally erupting into fantastic displays of hundreds, even thousands of meteors an hour. No such outburst is predicted for this year, but meteor showers are unpredictable and it’s not impossible! Unlike most meteor showers, the Draconids are best viewed in the evening instead of the early morning, so you don’t need to sacrifice too much sleep to observe them.

The most important factor in watching any meteor shower is having a dark, clear view—that’s easy for me here in Idaho, but it’s a bit more difficult for the StarTalk crew back East in New York, where the city (and the light) never sleeps. This year the moon will be an unfortunately large waxing crescent, which means that no matter where you are you won’t be able to get a completely dark sky, but still try to get away from the city lights if you can. Find a nice clearing where you can relax and stargaze for a few hours. Bring a reclining lawn chair or picnic blanket to lay down on so that you can gaze skywards comfortably, and look towards the constellation Draco in the night sky—hint: that’s why they’re called the Draconids. Draco looks like a dragon, and meteors will appear to radiate from near the dragon’s eyes.

EarthSky always has a great viewing guide complete with sky charts even a novice astronomer can easily utilize, so if you’re not sure how to find Draco in the night sky take a look at the guides below. Finding the radiant of the meteor shower certainly helps things, but it’s not critically important. If you can’t get to a dark enough sky you may not be able to see all of the stars in the constellation and it may be harder to find—but don’t give up! Although the meteors may appear to originate from Draco, they will streak across the sky in all directions, so just lay back, relax, and watch until you spot a few.

As meteors slam into our atmosphere they are superheated and vaporized, producing the brilliant colors we see in the night sky. The meteor’s color is determined by both the chemical composition of the meteor itself (think fireworks) and the ionization it creates in the atmosphere as it burns up. This annual meteor shower occurs as a result of Earth passing through a debris field left behind by Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. This shower is also sometimes called the Giacobinids, an homage to the comet’s original discoverer Michel Giacobini. As the comet gets closer to the sun and heats up, it sheds layers of itself into space, forming filaments of matter that the Earth later collides with. Meteors are the result of this debris burning up in our atmosphere. Much of this debris is relatively trivial in size—usually smaller than a pebble and weighing less than a gram or two. Most years we pass between the gaps in these filaments, interacting briefly with only the edge of one or two, but sometimes our orbit takes us head on into one of them, and those years produce spectacular shows. Astronomers can predict with relative accuracy when these outbursts will occur, but an encounter the comet had with Jupiter in the late 19^th century altered its orbit, and thus where the filaments have been laid down since then, resulting in some uncertainty and the possibility each year of a surprise spectacle. The next predicted Draconid outburst isn’t until 2019 (you can read more about Draconid outburst predictions and the methodology behind them here, but don’t let that discourage you. Some of the best shows have been predicted to be duds, and some of the most disappointing were predicted to be spectacular. Furthermore, any excuse to get outside and look up is a good one. Take a small telescope or pair of binoculars with you and observe the crescent moon, Saturn, or Mars while you wait for meteors—all of these targets should be easy to see in the evening sky. We often hear about spectacular alignments, meteor showers, “supermoons,” and other astronomical phenomena, but really every night is an opportunity to witness a once-every-40,000-years occurrence of something or another—so get out there and look! If you can’t make it outside to watch the Draconids during their peak this year but you enjoy watching spaceship Earth plow through fields of space rubble as much as I do, check out NASA’s meteor watching guide for information on all the best showers this year.