As nights become longer, stargazing becomes so much better – Tvin Cities

The worry of this age is much easier, since the nights are now much longer than the day. Second, at the end of last weekend at the end of summer light, it's dark enough to stargazing up to 6 hours!

Despite all this, the best star this week is early in the morning two to three hours before sunrise. Who wants to go to bed early and set an alarm for 3 or 4 in the morning? You want to see the early morning sky taking place for the week's great performances, that is, clouds do not photograph the sky. Fix a large cup of coffee, connect, grab a grass seat and blankets and prepare to be blinded. The show is even better in the darker nature, but even if you have to compete with the city lights, it's worth it to stand up.

When you go out for the first time, just sit back on the grass seat or lean against your car and let your eyes be used in the darkness. You can not help but be thrilled with the big star show that happens in the early morning of the southern sky. Fantastic winter constellations flood that part of the sky. Orion and his gang are hanging out here. Orion the Hunter and his neighboring gang of constellations – Taurus Bull, Gemini Gemini and others – gradually move from the south to the southwest sky as you approach the morning dusk. I never get tired of watching those great celestial characters. Although it's not quite winter, Orion and his position are considered to be winter constellations, because in January, as the Earth continues its orbit around the Sun, these lights will be seen in the early evening sky, so consider their review of this week's wonderful evening stargazing that will come.

To get to know these constellations, take a good star map in January. You can find good at skimaponline.net and set up for early nights sometime in January. Make sure you use the red lamp to view the map so as not to destroy the night vision. Of course, there are many great stargazing applications for smartphones. My favorite is "Ski Guide." In this application, you can rotate the screen on your phone in red to keep the night view.

While in the early morning you take wonderful all the bright stars, you will also see some stars shooting through the sky dome. They are not really stars, but meteors that are released into our atmosphere. Later this week, and especially this weekend, you're sure to see more meteors than normal. This is because the annual meteor shower Leonid will be top-notch. Leonids are not the best meteor shower of the year, but I would put them in the upper layer. What makes them attractive this year is that there is no moon in the early hours of the morning, which means that there is a much darker background for capturing these "falling stars".

Annual meteor showers, such as Leonid, occur when the Earth floats in the orbit around the sun in the remains left by the comet. Comets are more or less "dirty snowballs" of rocks and ice that turn sun into highly elliptical separated orbits. When their orbits are taken close to the Sun, they partially dissolve, leaving a trail of trash making small particles of the size of a grain of dust to small pebbles of size small marbles.

The comet that launches Leonid's meteor shower is called Temple Tuttle, which last came from this part of the solar system in 1998 and will not return by 2031. The Earth in its solar orbit hits this trail of Temple Tuttle at 66,000 miles, and At the same time, these individual pieces of pieces or remains stutter together in their orbit in thousands of kilometers per hour. This means that the remains can collapse into our atmosphere at speeds of over 150,000 miles an hour!

At such speed, individual particles are rapidly burnt due to huge air friction, but the light we see is not due to combustion. It's impossible to see because these small particles burn anywhere from 50 to 150 miles high. The series we see is a brilliant column of air that is chemically excited by the particle that passes it. Sometimes it seems that these lines are of different colors, indicating the type of atmospheric gas that is temporarily excited.

Meteor tours are best seen after midnight, because that's when you are on the side of a rotating Earth that spurs the comets. It's like driving in a district on a warm summer night. On your windshield you get more bugs than you do on your last window. After midnight, we are confronted with the "windshield" of the traveling Earth.

Leonid's meteor shower was not named after Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. They are called Leonids because it seems that meteors are emanating from the sky where the constellation is Leo Lyon. After midnight, Leo hangs in the eastern sky and looks like the last question mark. This does not mean that you should limit hunting to meteors only to that area of ​​the heavens. If you do, many will be missing because meteors can appear anywhere in the sky.

The best way to look at Leonids or any other meteor shower is to take a seat on the grass seat with blankets sometime after midnight, preferably after 2 or 3 in the morning, turn your eyes around the night sky and see how many meteors you spot in the watch. It's a fun group or family activity.

CELESTIAL HUGS