Geminid Meteor Shower: How to Watch Its Peak in Night Skies
The New York Times
A picture from the meteor shower in 2020 highlights how brilliant this winter sky show can be.
Night sky enthusiasts are gearing up to enjoy one of the best meteor showers of 2021, the Geminids, which peak on Monday night into Tuesday morning.
Along with the Perseids in the summer, the winter Geminids are one of the most anticipated meteor showers of the year, producing potentially a hundred or more spectacular streaks per hour that shoot across the heavens.
The Geminids originate from an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon that orbits the sun every 1.4 years, scattering pieces of itself as it travels. Those tiny rocks slam into our atmosphere, creating trails of dazzling light as they burn up. As Earth plows into Phaethon’s debris field, the resulting meteors all appear to streak from a spot in the sky, called a radiant, where the constellation Gemini sits, hence the meteor shower’s name. Other showers originate from comets.
