The Leonid meteor shower will brighten the skies over North America early Tuesday morning, with Central Texans set to have a good vantage point for the annual light show.
"It's particularly fortunate that right now it's a new moon, so the sky is dark and that's always an advantage when you're looking at a meteor stream," said Anita Cochran, assistant director of the McDonald Observatory.
She says the best viewing in Central Texas should be between about 2:30 and 5:30 a.m. Tuesday (Nov. 17), away from city lights. She says experts are estimating viewers could see between 10 and 30 meteors an hour.
The meteors will appear to be flying out of the Leo constellation. To see them, she advises looking straight up, and then slightly to the east and north.
"It's what people call a falling star, which is the same thing," she said. "It's a piece of dust somewhere between a millimeter and centimeter size, so relatively small stuff is what's causing these trails. They're coming in fairly fast, which means you get long trails off of them."
The meteors visible Tuesday morning will be dust from when the Tempel-Tuttle comet orbited the sun in 1567.
"When the comet is in orbit around the sun and gets close to the sun, it gets heated, it releases material, some of which is dirt," she said. "The smaller particles get blown off by the wind coming off the sun, but the larger particles stay behind the comet and stay in orbit and eventually go away. So when the Earth's orbit intersects one of these debris fields left over when the comet has passed, and when the particles from the comet's passage hit the earth's atmosphere that's when we see the meteor streams."
The best viewing worldwide is expected to be in Asia.
