If the sky is clear this weekend, you are in for a holiday show: the Geminid meteor shower.
You could potentially see a shooting star every minute, according to Sky and Telescope, from 10 p.m. on; although, according to EarthSky, after midnight will be the most spectacular.
"Go out late in the evening, lie back in a reclining lawn chair, and gaze up into the stars," said Sky and Telescope Senior Editor Alan MacRobert. "Relax, be patient, and let your eyes adapt to the darkness."
If you follow a meteor's footsteps back, you'll find an imaginary line that crosses Gemini near the stars Castor and Pollux, according to Sky and Telescope. That point of origin is called the shower's radiant. If you could see the meteors approaching, that's where they'd be coming from.
Meteor showers occur when Earth plows through fine particles shed by a comet, but Geminid is different. Geminid meteors are created by debris no larger than peas from an asteroid only three miles across, 3200 Phaethon.
Phaethon, discovered in 1983, orbits the Sun every 1.4 years (closer to the sun than any other known asteroid) with particles travelling 22 miles per second, according to Sky and Telescope. Phaethon's ice has been melted by its close encounters with the sun, and now NASA classifies it as "an extinct comet." Pieces of the asteroid, or comet, have created a "river of rubble" that Earth cuts into every December. When one of the bits passes into the Earth's upper atmosphere (about 50 to 80 miles overhead), it vaporizes, resulting in a white-hot shooting star.
Too cold? Hard to see due to city lights? Check out NASA's live stream of the spectacular here:
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
