Sky Show Of The Century
People around the world broke out lawn chairs and bundled up to watch what was expected to be one of the best light shows that Mother Nature would put on this century.
As promised, the annual Leonid meteor shower produced a few shooting stars a minute that lit up the evening sky and delighted viewers who opted for star-gazing over sleep.
"In the last 10 minutes, I've observed no less than about 20 Leonids. The moon is high and bright, but they are clearly visible," Mike Walsh of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, wrote on spaceweather.com, a Web site that devoted its main page to the Leonids.
In Paradise, Texas, which is 35 miles northwest of Fort Worth, about 40 people gathered early Tuesday on a site owned by the Fort Worth Astronomical Society. The crowd responded favorably when an especially bright meteor crossed the sky. Several meteors could be seen streaking across the night with bright tails.
"It's just one of those lifetime events," said Richard Brown, a member of the astronomical society.
At NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., an all-night "Leonids Live" show was being broadcast on the Internet. Eight scientists discussed questions, including whether meteorites make any sounds before they burn and crash.
"They do," said Steve Roy, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who was at the center. "We're covering the whole gamut of science related to meteorites, including a live report from Antarctica, where they've been collecting meteorites on the surface of the ice. We're having fun."
Despite the excitement, clouds and rain dampened the evening's sky show in Alabama and other parts of the world, all of which may have to wait decades for another meteor shower so spectacular.
"I'm big time upset," said Frank Six, manager of the space science department at NASA's Alabama site. "To see it is like watching fireworks in the heavens. We just aren't getting that chance tonight."
Most Canadian star gazers also were disappointed. Poor weather across most of the country left sky watchers with a gauzy view of dense cloud cover instead of the much-anticipated Leonid meteor storm.
"Astronomy, unfortunately, is a little bit fickle in that you're at the mercy of the clouds," said Richard Huziak, 45, a member of the Saskatoon center of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Many astronomers in Europe had their view spoiled by clouds, mist and fog early Tuesday. In Italy, the National Meteorology Center said skies were clear only in Sicily and some areas in Puglia, the region that makes up the heel of the boot-shaped peninsula.
Giuseppe Pupillo, an astronomer with the National Research Center in Bologna, northern Italy, traveled all the way down to Lecce in Puglia to witness the event.
"The weather cleared at around midnight and we were able to see the peak of the phenomenon between 4 and 5 a.m.," he said, speaking from Lecce.
"I counted maybe a thousand meteors in an hour, I have never seen a meteor shower of this intensity, I have never seen anything like it," he added.
"Unfortunately there where very few people, due to the bad weather."
Few amateur astronomers throughout Italy stayed up all night to watch the shower, said Roberta Zabatti, editor of the astronomy magazine "Coelum" (Latin for Sky).
"As a magazine, we usually get many reports on these phenomena, but in this case we aren't getting much. Very few people must have been watching," she said.
The annual shower occurs when the Earth, on its yearlong orbit of the sun, passes through the trail of dust left in the wake of the comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings around the sun once every 33 years. The tiny grains of dust, traveling at 158,000 mph, hit the upper atmosphere and are vaporized, producing a telltale streak of light.
"The particles are moving 50 to 100 times faster than a speeding bullet," NASA's Six said. "Some of the particles are the size of a grain of sand or small pebbles."
The dust boils off the comet each time it passes close to the sun's warming rays. Earth intersects those debris trails each year in mid-November. This year, Earth crosses two of the trails, laid down in 1767 and 1866.
Both are made up of dense concentrations of dust, which makes for a more intense shower or storm. Last year's shower was another such case.
The Earth is not expected to strike another stream of equal density until 2098 or 2131.
The Leonids are named for the constellation Leo that marks the direction from which the meteors appear to arrive.