Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers #5: A “Meteor Storm”

A meteor storm!  The very term makes an honest stargazer’s heart beat faster.  While a good meteor shower, like the Perseids, may show 50-60 meteors every hour, a meteor storm sprays shooting stars at a rate of hundreds or thousands an hour.  During a spectacular storm in 1833, the sky seemed to “fill with falling fire” for nearly half the night.

While spectacular, a meteor storm, which comes in at #5 on our “Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers”, may be the most difficult to see because they are extremely brief and rare.

But take heart.  NASA is already preparing to deal with a possible outburst next year from a usually lacklustre shower in Draco.  And since such events are hard to predict, there may be more opportunities in the coming years.   One thing for sure… if you do see a meteor storm, you’ll never forget it.

The Leonid meteor shower, which peaks this week in the early morning of November 17, has offered stargazers the most reliable opportunity to see a meteor storm.  The shower flares up every 33 years to present a deluge of meteors for a few hours on the early morning on or around November 17.  Experts predict this year’s Leonids will be quite tame, alas.  So meteor storm this year.

But there have been some remarkable Leonids in the past.  The great Leonid meteor storm of 1833 was perhaps the most spectacular in recorded history.  Visible from eastern North America, the storm produced as many as 200,000 meteors per hour, startling 19th-century observers into a glazed stupor or near-catatonic terror.  Nearly everyone awakened to see the bright meteors and attending commotion on the morning of November 12.  The storm lasted nearly four hours.  According to astronomer Agnes Clerke, “the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm”.

An engraving showing the 1833 Leonid meteor storm; a second image, showing the storm over Niagara Falls, is shown at the top of the page.

The meteors came so quickly during this 1833 storm, it was clear the radiant, or apparent source, of the meteors lay towards the Sickle of the constellation Leo.  And the radiant moved with the stars during the evening, which finally made it clear that meteors came from outside the Earth’s atmosphere.  Until then, some believed meteors were an atmospheric phenomenon, the belief of which lended the term “meteorology” to the study of the weather.

Astronomers looked at historical records to determine the Leonids peaked at multiples of 33 years… in 1799, 1533, 1366, 1202, and 1037, for example.  We now know the peaks correspond to brief periods during which Earth passes through a concentration of debris left in the path of Comet Tempel-Tuttle.  The Leonids last peaked in 1999, with bonus peaks in 2001 and 2002 (though they did not approach the dramatic peak of 1833).

Sadly, the Leonids will likely remain quiet this year, and for many years to come.  Perturbations of the comet by Jupiter mean the Earth may miss the usual rendezvous with this stream of concentrated comet dust for many decades, perhaps.

So chances are, none of us may ever see anything like the outburst of 1833, or even 1999.  But there are still opportunities to see a respectable meteor storm, though it likely won’t be the Leonids.

Your best near-term bet for a meteor storm lies with the Draconid meteor shower next year.   The Draconids, so-named because the meteors streak across the sky from a point in the constellation Draco, will peak on October 8, 2011.  Experts believe it may put on a good show, with perhaps 750 meteors per hour… we’ll have more information as the date approaches.  With a little luck, you’ll see a rich and remarkable spray of meteors.  And you can check this event off your celestial bucket list.