Symbolic Forest

This is not going to turn into an astronomy blog, I promise, and I know I already mentioned some exciting upcoming astronomy news just over a week ago. There is something else interesting and astronomical happening in December, though.

In the meantime, the clouds did briefly break on Saturday evening to give us our first chance of using The Child Who Likes Space’s telescope without the moon shining bright in the south. We had a look at Mars, and then I successfully found Uranus, navigating downwards from Sheratan, the nearest naked-eye star I could easily pick out; it’s currently near to the boundary between Aries and Cetus. Looking just like another blue star, I would have had no idea, without guiding myself with a map on the computer, that we were looking at a planet instead.

And then, naturally, I started sending messages to people saying “Guess what? I’ve been spying on Uranus”, because I still have the sophisticated sense of humour of a ten-year-old.

The exciting event that’s coming up in a week or so’s time is: the Geminid meteor shower. I say “coming up”: it’s expected to be at its strongest at around 2 in the morning next Monday (the 14th), but if it is a strong shower this year, there should be activity visible for a few hours either side of that time, and even for a few days. Incidentally, because of the geometry of how meteor showers work—they happen when the Earth passes through the trail of dust left behind a comet or asteroid—the peak time is the same wherever you are, with the location of the peak moving around the planet as it spins. The Geminids were first noticed in the 1860s, but their “parent”, the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, was not discovered until 120 years or so later.

I’m not sure I’m going to risk keeping The Child Who Likes Space up until midnight to watch for meteors, much as I’m sure he would like to. If the skies are clear late one night this week, though, I might try wrapping up warmly and setting up my deckchair in the garden. There’s no point trying to use a telescope or binoculars to spot meteors; all you need is a comfy chair you can lie back in and look up at the sky. Give your eyes half an hour to adapt to the dark, then look up, look around, and wait for them to streak across the sky.

Keyword noise: astronomy, meteors, meteor shower, Geminids, Uranus.