Keep your eyes peeled to the north tomorrow night, May 23 to early May 24 for a meteor shower created by debris from Comet 209P/LINEAR. The comet circled the Sun 200 years ago and looks like it may prove to be a sparkler. The shower has astronomers downright giddy.
"Given the current orbit of the comet, all the [debris] trails ejected between 1803 and 1924 do fall in the Earth's path in May 2014!" Jeremie Vaubaillon, of the Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Éphémérides in France, told Space.com in 2012. "As a consequence, this shower might as well be a storm."
"This potential new shower is so new that astronomers aren't sure what to expect," narrator Jane Houston Jones said in a skywatching video released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on April 30. "Predictions run from less than 100 meteors per hour up to an unlikely but possible meteor storm as high as 1,000 per hour."
Read More at Smithsonian.com.
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