Watch out for Geminids meteor shower this weekend – Cloud may be a problem for us in Deeside :-(

 

The Geminid’s meteor shower will peak during tonight and Sunday night.

Sky watchers predict this weekend’s Geminids will be a particularly beautiful display due to the gibbous Moon rising after midnight causing little interference to the showers.

However, Deeside could be in for some cloudy weather which will obscure the view..

In a year when moonlight doesn’t obscure the view, you can see 60 to 100 Geminid meteors per hour on the peak night. 

The Geminids appear over the horizon in the early evening so that meteors may be seen early on in the night, rates will steadily grow as the moon gets higher in the sky.

The best viewing, as always, is as far away as possible from the bright street lights of towns however, for us in Deeside weather will be crucial factor, cloud can obviously obscure the view and tonight, sadly, we have cloud forecast from around 9pm onwards, lets hope the forecasters have got it wrong.

For those living in the south east and around Kent, they will get a prolonged view at a clear sky tonight.

Tonight’s weather over Deeside from the BBC

This is what NASA says about the Geminids shower:

Geminids are pieces of debris from an object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet.Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun.Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini.When the Geminids first appeared in the early 19th century, shortly before the U.S. Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display.