When I was a child, I was fascinated with a straight line of three stars that were evenly spaced. Whenever I looked up in the sky, I would be comforted by being able to find those stars, especially when I was about to embark on a long walk home at night. I later learned that they were actually known as Orion’s Belt, part of the constellation of Orion. So Orion remains my favourite constellation.
These nights, Orion takes centre stage in stargazing circles since the Orionid meteor shower will be originating from a point near the constellation. Of course, Orion has nothing to do with the shower. It merely marks the apparent direction that it comes from (see red dot in image below).
(Above is the view of the sky looking Southsoutheast from mid northern latitudes at 3:00am today.) We will be traversing a debris field made of stuff left over from Halley’s comet’s tail. That stuff will rain down into our atmosphere, glowing brightly as it burns up on entry.
So go out and have a look. There could be as many as about 20 per hour, I’ve heard. Wrap up warm. The peak was in the early morning on Saturday but you should still see some fireworks tonight. Have a look at this site for details. It is the site I borrowed the diagram from, which shows you roughly where they will be apparenly coming from. Here is another site showing both northern and southern skies, and more information.
Enjoy!
-cvj
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One of my faves, the other being Scorpius, being a Scorpio. Nice they are in the same area, just different times of year. ;^)
And I *did* spot some meteors the other night! Just happened to wake up in the middle of the night and felt like getting in the spa, then saw lovely meteors. Very cool….
Clifford, thanks for making the universe make sense a little bit more. 🙂 I’m on fall break right now in rural New Hampshire and was stargazing with my scope Saturday night, which was forever interrupted by brightly streaking meteors which left trails in the sky. Dark skies tend to let more of these show so it wasn’t completely unusual but I was wondering if some shower was going on, and I forgot the Orionids I suppose… it’s always quite nice when something like an unexpected meteor shower comes and surprises you though!
Wow ! That sounds wonderful. No I have not been there. I hope to do so one day. Indeed, Astronomy down there is wonderful, and the peope in the region are indeed taking advantage of that resource.
Best,
-cvj
Hi Clifford 🙂
have you ever been in Namibia? One of the clearest night sky I’ve ever seen (that’s where the HESS-telescope is). I was lucky to be there for a total lunar eclipse (in 2001 or so). It was very impressive, you could see the whole Milky Way incl. the Magellan clouds, etc. Wow! Best,
B.
Bee! Exactly the same thing hit me when I went to south Africa for the first time… Cassiopeia -which I also think of as a big W-is indeed one of my favourite things to “root” me when I am south of the Equator!
Best,
-cvj
Hi Clifford, Hi Dissonant,
Indeed, I also had the three stars in a line as my fixed point to remind me of my position in the universe 🙂 And how confused I was when I was in South Africa the first time, and all the stars were in unfamiliar places and angles! Instead of the Orion, what immediately caught my eye was a large W, which I learned is Cassiopeia.
Best,
B.
I like that part of the sky because the Orion Nebula (M42) can represent well the birth of stars and the Crab Nebula (M1) can represent well the death of stars. I prepared a handout for my Astro 100 students a couple of years ago that described these facets along with a star chart for the students’ time and location, in order to encourage them to look UP!
Meteor showers are another rich topic. As a ‘dusty scientist’, I am biased and could write pages but I’ll mostly point to Wikipedia’s Meteor showers entry and to my (always in progress) Cosmic dust entry. With meteor showers, we are seeing a snapshot of _dust_in one of its most recycled states: from a molecular cloud into our solar nebula which was subsequently trapped inside a long-period comet (Halley) and further sloughed off by solar sublimation and other processes into a comet tail and then into the Orionids meteor trail that has become part of the hetereogenous zodiacal dust cloud that surrounds our present Solar System. This particular meteor stream is one of two meteor streams (the other is eta Aquarids) of the dusty debris left by comet Halley in one of its previous perihelion passes.
We seem to have the same favourite constellation. Maybe simply because it’s so big and easily spotted for a child looking up in the winter sky. With time I also picked up some of the associated mythology, and learned that Orion is the Warrior, with the three stars making up his belt. So basically this is the Kick-Ass Constellation. What’s not to like?
Here’s a piece of good news for you: while IE6 keeps eating your margins, IE7 renders your blog correctly. Apparently MS made an effort to improve its rendering engines’ standard compliance. So now all you have to do is wait for the ~90% or so IE users to upgrade. 🙂 Too bad that anyone using Windows 2000 or older can’t. 🙁 But maybe they’ll just switch to Firefox instead.