Meteor Shower Will Pass Over North Texas This Weekend
DENTON (CBSDFW.COM) - The sky above North Texas will tell the tale of a comet's tail this weekend. Earth is passing through the debris left by Halley's Comet -- a sort of cosmic smoke cloud several hundred million miles long.
"As we go around the sun...we go through that tail once a year," said UNT Astronomer Ron Dilulio. "And that tail is like going through these and a few of these come through our atmosphere and they burn.
The debris creates meteor showers. But debris is not big hunks of metal most people associate with meteors. Its the size of M&M's or smaller.
"There's so much activity that it ionizes the air around it," Dilulio said. "So, you've actually got a whole environment around each piece that's lighting up. And that's why its so bright."
The tiny fragments are about four and a half billion years old, older than the earth.
The peak time for viewing the meteor shower will be between midnight and sunrise on Sunday morning. The meteorites all appear to start near the constellation of Orion which will be in the east earlier in the night rising to almost overhead as it grows later in the morning.
The good news is, you don't have to have a telescope to enjoy the meteor shower. "These telescopes are great for looking at the planets and the moon and galaxies and all at night," Dilulio said of his astronomy department's big telescopes.
"But when you have an evening where you're going to have a meteor shower like that, like our Orionids, What you need is a sky like this where you don't have to have a telescope. You just want to sit back and look at the sky. So, that's really what its all about."
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