Peenie Wallie: Quadrantids Meteor Shower Jan 3-4

« Ground Control to Major Tom | Main | Photographing Meteors »

January 03, 2008

Quadrantids Meteor Shower Jan 3-4

OK. It looks like we've got another meteor shower scheduled. They say it's going to be the brightest meteor shower of 2008, but I have to admit I'm somewhat jaded. It seems like they always promise great showers and I only see one or five or ten or so. This time its the Quadrantids Meteor Shower on the night of January 3 - 4.

January 3, 2008 Quadrantids
Actually, the peak of this shower is on January 4 at 7 Universal Time – 1 a.m. Central Standard Time – during the night of January 3 for U.S. observers. In 2008, the moon is out of the way for this shower, which is known for being fast and furious. The shower has a sharp peak, and typically all worthwhile observing must be done no more than an hour or two either side of the peak. Face the general direction of northwest, beginning at about 11 p.m. Central Time on January 3. Remember that the meteors can be seen across a wide swath of sky.

There's a little Java web application called FLUXTIMATOR that allows you to put in your location and it will show you the expected number of shooting stars per hour for a ten hour time frame. However, because the experts can't agree on exactly when the peak will occur, there are two different little FLUXTIMATOR applets. The first one is based on the assumption that the peak occurs at 2h00m UT. The second one is based on the assumption that the peak occurs at 6h40m UT .

Mountain Standard Time (MST) is Coordinated Universal Time(UTC) - 7 hours. (UTC was formerly known as GMT).

First, I put in "10 Quadrantis 02:00" - "Denver, US" - "Mountaintop" - "Jan 3-4, 2008" - "DST=No". In this case, the graph indicates that the "Peak Time:04:16" and the peak rate is about 28.8 meteorites per hour.

Secondly, I put in "10 Quadrantis 06:40" - "Denver, US" - "Mountaintop" - "Jan 3-4, 2008" - "DST=No". In this case, the graph indicates that the "Peak Time:03:52" and the peak rate is about 52.7 meteorites per hour.

This is a little confusing to me, however, as I would expect that if the we are "Assuming the peak is at 2h00m UT", then I would back 7 hours out of that and I would assume that the peak time in Denver would be 7:00 p.m. MST on Jan 3rd. Furthermore, in the second case, where we are "Assuming the peak is at 6h40m UT", I would assume that the peak would occur at 11:40 MST. I posted a question on SlashDot to see if someone smarter than me can explain it to me.

Finally, the peak is supposed to be a sharp peak, so you may want to check at various times during the night. Good luck.

Update: The applet is probably adjusting for the fact that it might be daylight at my location when the meteor shower is at peak intensity for the planet. So, even though the two predictions for peak activity are 4 hours and 40 minutes apart, the different peaks at my location are only 24 minutes apart.

Technorati tags: Quadrantids Meteor Shower 2008
Delicious tags: Quadrantids Meteor Shower 2008

Folksonomy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share web pages.