The best meteor shower of the year starts tonight, and here’s how you can view it

Karen Fratti
Updated
The best meteor shower of the year starts tonight, and here’s how you can view it
The best meteor shower of the year starts tonight, and here’s how you can view it

If you need a little pick-me-up this week, there’s some good news from outer space. Aka, the best meteor shower of the year starts tonight, December 13th. Who couldn’t use a little star gazing ahead of the winter solstice? At the very least, it will be a great light show — if you know how to find it.

This week’s meteor shower is called the Geminid, and it appears every December when Earth passes through a dust cloud that’s created by a rocky object known as 3200 Phaethon. As the dust and dirt from 3200 Phaethon comes into contact with our atmosphere, it burns up and creates a flurry of what looks like shooting stars — but really it’s just a bunch of debris on fire, 64 million miles away. Pretty cool, right?

According to Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, scientists don’t know for sure what 3200 Phaethon really is, but most researchers agree that it’s either a “near Earth asteroid or an extinct comet.”

The three-mile-long rock will be closer to earth than it’s ever been since it was discovered in 1983, so while you’re staring up at the heavens, NASA scientists will be trying to figure out more about the mysterious object.

Here’s what the Geminid looked like last year, in Russia.

PRIMORYE TERRITORY, RUSSIA - DECEMBER 15, 2016: The night sky over the Galenki RT-70 radio telescope at a Kvant-D command and measurement complex which is part of the Titov Main Space Test Centre, during the Geminids meteor shower. Yuri Smityuk/TASS (Photo by Yuri SmityukTASS via Getty Images)
PRIMORYE TERRITORY, RUSSIA - DECEMBER 15, 2016: The night sky over the Galenki RT-70 radio telescope at a Kvant-D command and measurement complex which is part of the Titov Main Space Test Centre, during the Geminids meteor shower. Yuri Smityuk/TASS (Photo by Yuri SmityukTASS via Getty Images)

Eric Vandernoot, astronomy and physics lab coordinator at Florida Atlantic University, told the Sun Sentinel that the shower should have hints of red and yellow, but you’ll need to be far enough away from the city to really see it.

“The only thing for folks to do is to travel to find a wide open space away from city lights to see the meteors. If that is too difficult for them, then I often advise people to head east towards the shore. Much of the shower will tend to come from the east as the Earth rotates into the debris train of the asteroid Phaethon,” he said.

Cooke says that the Geminid activity is really “broad,” but that it’s best seen between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. between December 13th and 14th.

You don’t need a special contraption to see it, but Cooke does recommend tracing a meteor backwards with your naked eye once you spot one to figure out if what you saw was a Geminid or some other meteor, since they do happen all the time. “If you end up in the constellation Gemini there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Geminid,” Cooke said.

So grab your hot chocolate, bundle up, and go check out the sky tonight!