A meteor shower with a reputation for "delivering the goods" will peak Monday night over much of the U.S., giving sky watchers a chance to witness its brilliant light show, experts say.
Stargazers looking for the best view of the Leonid meteor shower should turn their eyes to the sky between midnight and dawn Monday and again on Tuesday morning, astronomers say.
The Leonids should be good for 10 to 15 meteors per hour this year, experts say, although a partially illuminated waning crescent moon may somewhat attenuate the show.
While 10 to 15 per hour is considered a good rate for most meteor showers, the Leonids have a reputation to live up to; in past peak years the annual November shower has sometimes generated thousands of "shooting stars."
"The Leonids are considered one of the more prolific meteor showers in our night skies every year," Web-based community observatory service Slooh.com said in a release. "They are associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle, and have been known to produce at meteor storms with rates of nearly 1,000 meteors an hour."
Visitors to the website can see coverage beginning at 8 p.m. EST from Slooh's telescope at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands (IAC) and later from Prescott Observatory in Arizona.
NASA will also carry a live stream of the event from a telescope at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
For the best view, says NASA meteor expert Bill Cook at the Huntsville center, sky watchers should select a location well distant from city lights.
Lie on your back or recline on a lawn chair and look straight up, he says, for the best chance to see meteors appearing to originate from the constellation Leo rising above the northeast horizon.
The Leonid show is just one of a number of annual meteor showers that includes the Perseids and the Orionids, all named for the constellation that the showers appear to radiate from.
The parent comet for the Perseids shower, which occurs in July or August, is the Swift-Tuttle. It and the comet Tempel-Tuttle bear the name of Horace Parnell Tuttle, one of two independent discoverers of both comets.
The Orionids of mid-October are associated with perhaps the most famous of all comets, Halley's Comet, which makes a return to the inner solar system every 75 to 76 years.
