April and May is a great time to try your hand at a little backyard stargazing
Peter McMahon | Special to the Fitzhugh
Spring brings an exciting return of shooting stars, after a period with no major meteor showers since the beginning of the year.
This is a great time to do a little backyard stargazing, with the April Lyrid meteor shower peaking on the night of April 21, going into the morning of April 22 (but you may see meteors anytime between April 16 and 30) with as many as 20 meteors an hour visible on-average under the dark skies of a new Moon.
Then, May 4-5, the Eta Aquarids will yield possibly dozens of meteors per hour, but while well worth a look, the nearly-full Moon will make the sky too bright to see some of the fainter shooting stars at that time.
What the heck are these things?
Meteor showers happen when Earth passes through trails of debris from comet tails and our planet plows into countless bits of tiny particles that typically range in size from a grain of sand to the size of a small piece of gravel.
When those meteors meet up with our atmosphere at supersonic speed, those bits of space debris push the air in front of them, super-heating themselves and that air to thousands of degrees, causing that air to light up as the meteors disintegrate across our sky.
While real stars in the sky are millions of times the size of Earth and dozens to hundreds of light years away, shooting stars are not only tiny as pebbles, but they're only 50 to 100 kilometres or so above us.
Occasionally, bigger pieces, the size of a tennis ball or baseball make their way through our atmosphere, creating what’s known simply as a ‘fireball’ - a bright streak of light bright enough to cast shadows or even look like a set of fireworks shooting sideways.
To see the next meteor shower
While you'll see meteors (nicknamed shooting stars) appear to come from all over the sky, you can trace these streaks back to their radiant: the point they appear to originate from. Imagine the Earth as a car traveling down a road - our orbit around the Sun - and the radiant point for a meteor shower as the windshield of that car.
The radiant for each meteor shower is named after the constellation the radiant appears to line up with (Lyra the harp for the Lyrids, Aquarium for the Eta Aquarids, Perseus the soldier for the well-known summer Perseids, and so on).
While a lot of how-to guides will tell you to look at a particular time (on the day or days of the peak of the meteor shower, when the radiant point is highest in the sky), I find I have as much or more luck by going out for as much of the night as possible, the night before the peak during and a night or two after.
Think of doing so as an ‘insurance policy’ against it clouding over, ensuring skies are as dark as possible if a particular meteor shower peak falls close to a full Moon or if the predicted peak just plain ends up happening earlier or later than predicted.
Rolling the dice... on a cosmic scale
Over the last few years, we've noticed here in Jasper on more than a few occasions that meteor showers have needed up having the best showings a day or two before their peak
So how do you stay up the whole night to see as much as possible?
Do what works for you. Spend a while philosophizing with everyone in your household, take shifts staying up with family members and wake everyone up when things start to get good, or just sit back and let the adrenaline of anticipation fuel you.
Remember, when you see a shooting star, don't forget to yell (the one time in amateur sky-gazing when everyone is expected to get rowdy) - and don't forget to make a wish!
Peter McMahon is the general manager of The Jasper Planetarium
