If skies are clear during this upcoming week, you’ll want to take a number of moments to gaze upward. You simply could be lucky and catch a glimpse of a spectacular sky sight — a Taurid meteor.
The Taurid meteors are a weak, long-lasting, diffuse shower, visible throughout the first half of November. They’re slow, with a high proportion of fireballs. Late-night viewing can be hampered somewhat by light from the waning moon until about Nov. 9, but rates of 10 meteors per hour can occur anytime until Nov. 13. Rates of three or 4 per hour could be seen from late October through November’s end.
The Taurids are unusual in that lots of the meteors could be seen within the evening in addition to within the morning, for the reason that shower’s radiant, or apparent origin point — about 5 degrees south of the famous Pleiades star cluster — is fairly high all through the night. (Your clenched fist held at arm’s length covers about 10 degrees of sky.)
The upper a shower’s radiant, the more meteors appear in all places within the sky. The Taurid debris stream accommodates noticeably larger fragments than those shed by other comets, which is why this meteor shower occasionally delivers a number of unusually vibrant meteors referred to as “fireballs.”
The Taurids are the slowest meteors of any major shower, encountering Earth at “only” 17 miles (27 kilometers) per second. “The Taurid stream is noted for its many brightly coloured meteors,” Jeff Wood wrote in WGN, the newsletter of the International Meteor Organization. “Although the dominant color is yellow, many orange, green, red and blue fireballs have been recorded.”
Related: Taurid meteor shower 2023: When, where & tips on how to see it
Born from Comet Encke
The Taurid meteors are debris from the periodic Comet 2P/Encke, which has the shortest known orbital period for a comet, taking only 3.3 years to make one complete trip around the sun.
Because it seems, 2023 is considered one of those years where this comet is sweeping through the inner solar system. It made its closest approach to Earth on Sept. 24, at a distance
of 83.7 million miles (134.6 million km). It arrived at perihelion — its closest point to the sun — on Oct. 22.
The comet was first sighted in 1786 by French astronomers Pierre Méchain and Charles Messier. Caroline Herschel was the following to sight it in 1795, followed by Jean-Louis Pons in 1818. None of those observers had any clue that what all of them had observed was the identical comet. But in 1819, German astronomer Johann Franz Encke published a paper by which he concluded that every one of those observations were of the identical object, and predicted that it might return in 1822.
It did. And as such, Encke became only the second person to accurately forecast the
return of a comet, in much the identical way Edmond Halley had done a century
earlier. That explains the item’s “2P” designation: it’s only the second comet recognized to be periodic.
Because of this, the comet now bears Encke’s name — regardless that Encke himself apparently never took the time to stare upon it through a telescope!
Diminishing intervention from the moon
On Nov. 5, the last quarter (half) moon rises at around 11:40 p.m. But with each passing night, the moon can be rising on average about 50 minutes later, and the window of dark sky hours (prior to moonrise) opens slightly wider.
By the morning of Nov. 9, the moon — now only a slender sliver, which will even be hovering dramatically near the planet Venus — is not going to rise until around 2:45 a.m. and can provide little or no interference for meteor watchers.