Don't you just love this time of year? The living verdent hues of a green and pleasant land morphing magically into vibrant russets and crimsons, blanketing the earth with a crisp rustle of leaves of Time and change; the lengthening nights and golden diffused ambers of twilight; the season of impossiblitiy and myth and colourful lightning flashes of fireworks, ghostly ghouls and superstitious old wives tales that haven't quite abated even through centuries of history and learned logic? And now, nature adds her own phemnominal display of celebration.
Tonight thousands will be watching the skies, whether we are alone in the universe or not, the universe is vast and enchanting, beautiful and mysterious. Tonight the Leonids coome out to play!
The Leonids are possibly the most famous and favoured of meteor showers. The annual light show peeking around the 17th and 18th November. They're associated with the comet Temple-Tuttle as it orbit strays too close to the sun (closer than Jupiter's orbit - apparently!), like Icarus and his waxen wings. Clumps of froozen matter, called metorites, break away from the streaming comet as it rounds the constellation of Leo (thus Leonids). Wikipedia, everyone favourite online encyclopedia tells us that these fireballs which impact the Earth at 72km/hr "may be 9 mm across and have 85 g of mass and punch into the atmosphere with the kinetic energy of a car hitting at 60 mph. An annual Leonid shower may deposit 12 or 13 tons of particles across the entire planet".
So where to look? Hang on as I open my Star App - no seriously! Ok! At the moment 17:02, the moon is rising in Pisces to the East, but hte best marker for most is probably the 'Plough' - Ursa Major - the Great Bear and at the moment it is on the horizon to the North West (of me - Newtownards - Northern Ireland) and Leo is directly below it, just under the horizon.
The Leonnids will cross the horizon in the NE at 22:39 and move East then south to hit their highest point in the sky at about Seven in the morning, again the best marker being Ursa Major directly above Leo in the sky. The Moon will have set by 03:08 and the Sun doesn't rise again until 07:56 so you're best bet is to scale a neighbours (you don't want to fall through your own- do you?), bring a flask of hot soup and ring in the dawn with some shooting star watching!
The Leonids are active from the 10th to the 23rd of November but this is the peek of the activity so to all star gazers out there - have fun!
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