Windshield Earth

Meteor showers are a good way to remind Earthlings that their home really isn’t as stable as it feels but is, in fact, hurtling through space while turning like a top. Since you can’t see the shooting stars unless it’s night where you are, you can think of yourself as part of Earth’s windshield. The thin windshield of the atmosphere is the leading side colliding with a cloud of icy dust shorn from some snow ball of a comet’s heating up as it rounded the sun, replenished by subsequent roundings.

So it will be this weekend, from Saturday night into Sunday, with the Leonid meteor shower, one of the better of the annual showers that cycle through the year as Earth encounters a variety of comet dust clouds, in this case from Comet 55P/ Tempel-Tuttle.

"’We expect an outburst of more than 100 Leonids per hour,’ says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA‘s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. This pales in comparison to the Leonid storms of 2001 and 2002, when sky watchers saw thousands of meteors. Even so, a hundred per hour would make the Leonids one of the best showers of 2006."

The bad news is the show is going to be best in the northern hemisphere, with the best views in Europe and eastern North America, and you’re going to need a fairly dark spot, away from streetlights and other causes of urban light pollution to see the whole show. Otherwise you might see only one or two streaks of color an hour and miss the rest.