Nature’s putting on a show this week as the best meteor shower in the entire Southern Hemisphere will be over the Australian sky tomorrow.
The annual Geminid meteor shower will peak in the early hours of Tuesday, December 14th, but don’t worry if you’re not a night owl – the meteors will be visible for a day or two afterwards.
A pesky full moon will interfere a bit but it won’t block out the full show. “The nice thing about the Geminids is that they can have some really bright meteors,” Tanya Hill, an astronomer at Melbourne Planetarium, told ABC. “So that means you can see them even though there’s the glare of the Moon.” That’s great news for us amateur stargazers then.
The Geminids is a treat reserved only for the Southern Hemisphere audience – while the Northern Hemisphere sees more meteors, the Geminids are the best of the bunch. And unlike those up North, we get to enjoy the view in nicer weather.
With constant rates of meteors, the Geminids is the most reliable meteor shower of the year, followed by the Eta Aquarids (May) and the Orionids (October). And it’s only getting better due to the path we take through the debris trail changing.
The even better news is that the Geminids will be visible from anywhere in Australia, just as long as the weather holds up. Here’s when they’ll be best viewed from different cities around the country:
Adelaide – 11pm
Brisbane – 9pm
Canberra – 10:45pm
Darwin – 9:30pm
Hobart – 11:30pm
Melbourne – 11pm
Perth – 10pm
Sydney – 10:30pm
If you want to see as many meteors as possible, you’re advised to wait until the small hours, once the moon has set and the radiant is the highest in the sky. And those in the North of Australia will have it best, as the moon sets earlier and the radiant rises earlier which means the shower will be higher in the sky at its peak. So if you’re in Darwin, for example, you can expect to see as many as 40 meteors per hour. That’s almost too many meteors.
