Well, I’m exaggerating a bit — he hedges on it being a good possibility that might produce a good show.
Experts are predicting we may be in for quite a show: a brand spanking new meteor shower that will peak on the evening of Friday, May 23, 2014! Folks in the United States and Canada have the most favored viewing locations for this event (but that doesn’t mean you should forget about it if you’re elsewhere). Predicted rates for this new shower are quite high, about 100–400 meteors per hour, far higher than normal showers. And they’ll appear to be coming from an area of the sky near the north pole, so they should be visible raining down all over the sky!
I checked the weather report for my area, and it’s supposed to be “mostly sunny”, so I imagine that means patchy clouds in the evening, so not perfect viewing conditions. However, where I live, I can drive a mile out of town and find perfect darkness and a total absence of any artificial lighting, so that might offset the lack of flawless weather. I might give it a shot.
And if it doesn’t pan out, I can wag my finger at Plait on Saturday morning.
No point in me looking then :( Pretty sure I won’t be seeing anything from this far South.
Huh, whereas I should be able to see some from my bedroom.
And 100-400/hour, that’s pretty dense. Cool. I won’t have to wait for my birthday this year for my sparklerocks (go Perseids!).
Lots of rain for Southern China. The chances of seeing this are, sadly, pretty slim.
(Let us not even talk about light pollution…)
The funny thing about these predictions of a fantastic show is that they have been wrong far more frequently than they have been right. I’d say at least 9:1 that they’re wrong. Well you can always hope, and if you never look then you really have no chance of seeing a good show.
Too bad I’m in Chiwaukee instead of Dah YooPee. There I might see the meteors against a backdrop of the Aurora Borealis.
It’ll be daylight here in Scotland by peak time, but is the time inaccurate enough that there might be a payoff to getting cold several hours earlier?