Lyrid meteor shower Monday night

April 21st, 2013

Peter Nolan

Every year in late April Earth passes through the dusty tail of Comet Thatcher (C/1861 G1), and the encounter causes a meteor shower–the Lyrids. This year the shower peaks on Monday morning, April 22nd. Forecasters expect 10 to 20 meteors per hour, although outbursts as high as 100 meteors per hour are possible.

The predicted peak night for the 2013 Lyrid meteor shower is before dawn on April 22. Try watching from late night Monday (April 22) until dawn Tuesday (April 23). The main problem is that there will be lots of moonlight on this night. Usually, the hour before dawn is best, regardless of your location on the globe. Use your time outdoors to check out the constellation Lyra the Harp, the radiant point for the Lyrid meteor shower. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, Lyra rises over your north-northeastern horizon around 10 p.m.

What is a radiant point? If you see a meteor tonight, you can trace its path backwards to find that it radiated from the constellation Lyra. Meteors often don’t become visible until they are 30 degrees or so from their radiant point. In other words, the meteors will appear in any and all parts of the sky after Lyra ascends over the horizon in late evening.

It can be easy to find a meteor shower’s radiant point, and Lyra is easy to spot. It is small and compact. Many people see it as a little triangle set on top of an oblique parallelogram. This tiny but prominent constellation represents a lyre, an ancient musical instrument that is essentially a small harp. In Greek mythology, Lyra represents the lyre or harp of the musician Orpheus. It was said that when Orpheus played this instrument, neither mortal nor god could turn away.

Lyrids have nothing to do with Vega, the most prominent star in Lyra. The true source of the shower is Comet Thatcher. Every year in April, Earth plows through Thatcher’s dusty tail. Flakes of comet dust, most no bigger than grains of sand, strike Earth’s atmosphere traveling 49 km/s (110,000 mph) and disintegrate as streaks of light.

Lyrid meteors are typically as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper, which is to say of middling brightness. But some are more intense, even brighter than Venus. These “Lyrid fireballs” cast shadows for a split second and leave behind smokey debris trails that linger for minutes.

Occasionally, the shower intensifies. Most years in April there are no more than 5 to 20 meteors per hour during the shower’s peak. But sometimes, when Earth glides through an unusually dense clump of comet debris, the rate increases. Sky watchers in 1982, for instance, counted 90 Lyrids per hour. An even more impressive outburst was documented in 1803 by a journalist in Richmond, Virginia, who wrote:

“Shooting stars. This electrical [sic] phenomenon was observed on Wednesday morning last at Richmond and its vicinity, in a manner that alarmed many, and astonished every person that beheld it. From one until three in the morning, those starry meteors seemed to fall from every point in the heavens, in such numbers as to resemble a shower of sky rockets…” [ref]

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