Meteor Storm Starts Monday: Stunning Texas Fireball Heralds Week Long Event

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — for spotting a Geminid meteor! The 2012 Geminid meteor shower is forecast to be a lively meteor shower with great views in the skies over Earth. The week of Dec. 10-16 is a good window for Geminid-watching, but the night of Dec. 13 is the anticipated peak. 

On the night of Dec. 13-14 from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. EST, meteor experts from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will be available to answer your questions via a late-night Web chat. There will be two ways to ask your questions:

NASA Chat: Use the NASA chat module, which will appear on this page at 11 p.m. EST. Simply enter your name, then ask your question.

Ustream: Ask your question via the social stream on the embedded Ustream feed. Note that while the Ustream video feed will be active at dark, the experts will not be available to answer question in the social stream until 11 p.m. EST.

› Convert to your local time 

Watch the Geminids! Live Ustream Feed 

A live Ustream feed of the Geminid shower will be embedded below on the night of the chat (Dec. 13-14). The camera is mounted at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Before the camera activates, you will see either pre-recorded footage or a blank box. The camera is light-activated and will turn on at dusk. 

Geminids are pieces of debris from an object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini. When the Geminids first appeared in the early 19th century, shortly before the U.S. Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display. 

On Friday of this past week a herald of the upcoming meteor shower blazed across Texas.  

The American Meteor Society has received 30 reports of a bright meteor that occurred near 06:45  CST on Friday December 7, 2012. Brightness estimates of this fireball vary considerably, but the average lies near magnitude -20, which lies between the full moon and the sun. Needless to say, it was very bright! Every color of the rainbow has been reported with green being most mentioned. Below is a map of the witness reports for the Texas fireball event and can also be found in the fireball logs, refer to event 2085.  Click the image below to see the interactive event map.

For those not familiar with meteors and fireballs, a fireball is a meteor that is larger than normal. Most meteors are only the size of small pebbles. A meteor the size of a softball can produce light equivalent to the full moon for a short instant. The reason for this is the extreme velocity at which these objects strike the atmosphere. Even the slowest meteors are still traveling at 10 miles per SECOND, which is much faster than a speeding bullet. Fireballs occur every day over all parts of the Earth. It is rare though for an individual to see more than one or two per lifetime as they also occur during the day, on a cloudy night, or over a remote area where no one sees it. Observing during one of the major annual meteor showers can increase your chance of seeing another one of these bright meteors.

Meteors often appear much closer than they really are. I receive countless reports that the object landed just over the hill when in fact it was several hundred miles away and was witnessed over several states. It is your perspective that makes meteors appear to strike the horizon when in fact they are still high in the atmosphere. This is much like a jetliner seen low in your sky. It appears low to you but for someone located many miles away in that direction, the jetliner is passing high overhead. Meteors become visible at approximately 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. Friction slows these objects down until they fall below the velocity necessary to produce light. At this point they still lie at least 5 miles high in the sky. They are invisible below this altitude and cannot be seen as they basically free falling to the ground at 200mph. Very few meteors actually reach the ground as 99.99% completely disintegrate while still 10-20 miles up in the atmosphere.

Very bright Leonid Fireball with 10 minute train was caught by my all sky camera this morning. I did not witness the event myself but my camera was recording. Condesation problems on the camera are evident in the image but did not block out the fireball. 

Photo credit: Dan Bush

KHOU 11 News viewer Mary Bush, in the Houston area, took this photo about two minutes after the flash

Credit: KHOU

Robert Lunsford, American Meteor Society

False-color image of a 2011 Geminid meteor, captured by a camera at New Mexico State University, operated by the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, Ala. 

 Credit: NASA/MSFC/MEO 

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