Stargazers get ready! Mid-March welcomes a different kind of astronomical experience: the peak of the y-Normid meteor shower on March 15th. This southern hemisphere meteor shower runs from February 25th through March 28th, but astronomers predict that the night of greatest activity will occur on the 15th. On this night, you can expect to see up to six meteors per hour.
While the γ-Normids aren’t one of the major meteor showers in the year, viewers in the southern hemisphere can enjoy trying to spot meteors as they radiate from the constellation Norma, with an estimated ZHR (meteors per hour) of 4. The shower is expected to reach peak activity at around 22:00 PDT on March 14, 2023. The shower will peak close to new moon, and so moonlight will present minimal interference. The radiant of the γ-Normid meteor shower is at around right ascension 15h50m, declination 50°S.
According to In-The-Sky.org, meteor showers arise when the Earth passes through streams of debris left behind in the wake of comets and asteroids. Over time, the pieces of grit-like debris in these streams distribute themselves along the length of the parent object’s orbit around the solar system.
Shooting stars are seen whenever one of these pieces of debris collides with the Earth’s atmosphere, typically burning up at an altitude of around 70 to 100 km.
On certain days of the year the Earth’s orbit passes through particularly dense streams, associated with comets or asteroids which have vented particularly large amounts of solid material to space, and this gives rise to an annual meteor shower. Such showers recur on an annual basis, whenever the Earth passes the particular point in its orbit where it crosses the particular stream of material.
The meteors that are associated with any particular meteor shower can be distinguished from others because their paths appear to radiate outwards from a common point on the sky, which points back in the direction from which their orbital motion brought them.
This is because the grit particles in any particular stream are travelling in almost exactly the same direction when they cross the Earth’s orbit, owing to having very similar orbits to the parent object they came from. They strike the Earth from almost exactly the same direction, and at the same speed.
To see the most meteors, the best place to look is not directly at the radiant itself, but at any dark patch of sky which is around 30–40° away from it. It is at around this distance from the radiant that the most meteors will be seen.
By determining the position of this radiant point on the sky, it is possible to work out the orbit of the stream giving rise to any particular meteor shower. It is sometimes even be possible to identify the particular body responsible for creating the debris stream, if there is a known comet or asteroid with a very similar orbit.
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