Star date: 04:19:99

The Lyrids are Coming, The Lyrids are Coming....

This week presents us with one of the most beautiful and awe inspiring sights in nature. A meteor shower.

The shower will start about Tuesday April 20th and continue through Thursday the 22nd. Although not one of the largest meteor showers of the year (the geminids in December are the largest, followed by the Perseids in August), the Lyrids have the advantage of happening when the weather is just beginning to warm up in this area of the country. The opportunity to go outside and view the night sky in sweater or tee-shirt temperatures draws many more people outside to view the stars.

Like all meteor showers, this display will best be seen in the early morning, at which time it will be centered due south. The display should also be high in the sky (about 45 degrees above the horizon just before the break of dawn) at this time. People (like myself) who cannot bear to get up before dawn may still see quite a delightful show in the northeast/eastern sky, starting about 10 pm, daylight savings time. At this time, however, the shower will be centered right on the horizon, so roughly half of the shooting stars which would have been seen otherwise are lost beneath the horizon.

The Lyrid meteor showers offers up, on average, about 8 shooting stars per hour. This works out to about one shooting star every seven and a half minutes for morning observations. For evening observations, this is about one every fifteen minutes or so. The unaided eye is one of the best tools of all for observing meteor showers, as they occur so quickly (each one lasts at most a few seconds) that this is far too short of a time to point a telescope. Even if you could, you would see nothing more than you can with the unaided eye, as the meteors which make up a typical shooting star are about the size of an apple seed. It is the bright tail which makes it so dazzling. Even the wide field of view and additional light gathering abilities of a pair of binoculars are nearly useless when observing a meteor shower. You are truly best off with the oldest of astronomical instruments, the human eye.

When you are going out to observe a meteor shower, set yourself up a comfortable chair, dress so that you will be warm enough later on in the night as the temperature cools. Spend about 45 minutes at a time observing, and then rest for 15 minutes. This will make it so that your eyes are not strained.

Meteor showers are caused by comets. When a comet passes in front of Earths path, it often leaves debris in its wake. When the Earth later collides with that debris, we can often see several of these pieces of ice, stone and metal as they burn up in our atmosphere plummeting toward our home world.

The comet which is associated with the Lyrid meteor shower (which occurs between these dates every year) goes by the unromantic name of 1861. This means that it was the first comet discovered in 1861.

Far more of the particles which make up the head of a shooting star are made of stone then are made of metal (92% vs 6%. The other 2% are a mixture of the two). However, not surprisingly perhaps, metal tends to survive the great heat of entry into our atmosphere and are more noticeable when they do land on the ground. Therefore, about 2/3 of the meteors found are of the metal variety. Most of these are iron, a few nickel and some a combination.

For a long time, meteors were believed to be an atmospheric event, and this is why the study of the atmosphere is called meteorology.

Clear skies, and good viewing.

"Understanding is joyous" - Carl Sagan

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