Tag: Eta Aquariid

Eta Aquariids Outburst This Weekend – Next One in 2046

The eta Aquariid meteor shower should put on a spectacular sky show this year with meteor rates up to one per minute! The typical peak viewing time would normally be the night of May 4 into the morning of May 5. However, due to the outburst, May 2-6 could provide excellent skygazing opportunities.

According to Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, many of the shooting stars we see this year are actually caused by material from Halley’s Comet that is around 3,000 years old. As Earth runs into that debris, we can see streaks of light across the sky. When our planet moves through concentrated clumps of material, we can get a meteor outburst. The next time the eta Aquariids will outburst is about 20 years from now.

A sky full of falling meteors.
Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May 2023. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. Credit: Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava

Explanation: Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the eta Aquariids. In 2022, the eta Aquariids peak was visually hampered by May’s bright full Moon. But early morning hours surrounding last May’s shower of Halley dust were free of moonlight interference. In exposures recorded between April 28 and May 8 in 2022, this composited image shows nearly 90 eta Aquariid meteors streaking from the shower’s radiant in Aquarius over San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.

To really top off this year’s event, the new Moon aligns with the peak nights, therefore there will be no light interference to obscure the fainter meteors. There’s only one catch with this shower in particular – the best viewing time is from 4 a.m. to dawn. You will be able to see the glowing in the early evening, as the constellation Aquarius does not rise until around 4 a.m. local time. Set the alarm, grab the coffee, and settle in for what should be a magnificent meteor shower experience.

By Lauren Perkins
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

The eta Aquariid Meteor Shower Outburst to Peak the Night of May 4-5

A meteor streaks across the sky in a gif with trees in the foreground.
Credit: AMS Elizabeth Warner

The eta Aquariid meteor shower is active throughout April and May, peaking in the pre-dawn hours of May 5. This year could be particularly impressive as an outburst year with 120-160 meteors per hour expected.

“A meteor shower is like a normal rain shower, with 50-60 meteors per hour,” said Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “An outburst is like a thunderstorm, with greater than normal meteor activity expected. A meteor storm is like a tornado, where meteor rates are over one thousand per hour.”

Despite the full moon lighting up the sky and washing out the faint meteors, this year’s eta Aquariid meteor shower is not one to miss. In terms of producing fireballs, NASA camera data places it #6 among meteor showers. These bright fireballs are caused by Earth running into a dense stream of debris from Comet Halley, a lot of which was ejected more than 3,000 years ago. Moving at 148,000 mph, some of these fireballs leave glowing “trains” in their wake that last for several seconds to minutes.

C-141 Kuiper Airborne Imagery of Comet Halley (New Zealand Expedition) PHOTO CREDIT Photo taken with equipment designed, mounted on the headring and operated by the Charleston (South Carolina) County School District CAN DO Project;

How to View
The eta Aquariid meteor shower is viewable in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, with higher rates of visibility to observers in the Southern Hemisphere. This is due to the radiant’s location in the constellation of Aquarius. Meteors will be observable after midnight, but the peak times are 3-4 a.m. until dawn.

Regardless of your geographic location, you’ll want to find an area well away from city lights for best viewing. Give yourself about 30 minutes in the dark for your eyes to adapt – this means not looking at your phone. Look AWAY from the moon and take in as much sky as possible.

An image of an Eta Aquarid meteor from the NASA All Sky Fireball Network station in Tullahoma, Tennessee in May, 2013.

The next major meteor showers will be the Perseids in August, and the sister show to the eta Aquariids, the Orionids in October.

But there’s plenty more skygazing to do this month. Check out What’s Up in May from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

By Lauren Perkins 

Pieces of Comet Halley Strike the Moon!


Three meteoroids were seen hitting the moon last week — all of them possible pieces of Comet Halley! The Eta Aquariid — the meteor shower caused from Comet Halley, see post below — radiant was positioned so that almost the entire visible part of the moon was exposed to it. On the evenings of May 9-11, members of the Meteoroid Environment Office were out doing lunar observations and a meteoroid impact was seen each night.

The peak of the Eta Aquariids was the morning of May 5, but the rate is still high and meteors associated with this shower were still seen last week in multiple cameras over Alabama and surrounding states.

The following images are stills from the videos recorded those evenings; the impacts are seen on the dark portion of the moon.


May 9:


 

May 10:

 


May 11:

 

The movie below is the meteoroid impact from May 11 and after taking into account the brightness of the flash and the large amount of glare from the moon, this is one of the largest impacts we have seen to date!



To find out more about The Meteoroid Environment Office’s Lunar Impact program: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/index.html


Credit: Rhiannon Blaauw, NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office