Friday Night Celestial Double Header!

Burnsville Stars on the Square star party and Camelopardalids Meteor Shower

by Bob Hampton

The Blue Ridge Astronomy Group's Spring 2014 Burnsville Stars on the Square star party is this Friday night (May 23rd) from 9 PM until midnight on the town square in Burnsville.  As always we'll have a great assortment of powerful telescopes set up on the square ready to show you some of the wonders of the night sky!  If you've never seen the moons of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, or the ice cap on Mars, you should stop by the square Friday night and take a good look through the telescopes - you'll be glad you did!

Later that same night we're going to watch the sky from a much darker location - Mayland Community College's new International Dark Sky Park located at the Energy Xchange just off Hwy80N - soon to be the site of MCC's Blue Ridge Public Observatory!  We'll be watching for a brand new meteor shower (the Camelopardalids) that has never been seen before!

Beginning at about 2 AM on Saturday morning (May24th) the Earth will be passing through several streams of debris (dust and very tiny rocks) left long ago by Comet 209P/LINEAR (the 209th periodic comet ever discovered, found in 2004 by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project). This short period comet orbits the Sun once every 5 years.  At it's closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) it's just about the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is (one Astronomical Unit, or AU), and it's orbit is oriented such that it nearly intersects the orbit of the Earth!  Think of the comet's orbit as being "fixed" in space relative to the Sun, so with each orbit it very nearly retraces the path of its previous orbit, laying out a new trail of debris right next to the previous one.  After a while you can end up with quite a few of these debris streams right on top of each other.  On Saturday morning, between 2 AM and 4 AM EDT we'll be passing through 10 or more of these streams that were left by the comet from 1803 to 1924 (and possibly some as early as 1789 and as recent as 1979).

So how many meteors will we see?  The truth is nobody knows.  We've never passed through these debris streams before, so there's just no way to make an informed prediction about it.  Current estimates are for 100 to 400 meteors per hour visible from our location, some of them very bright, with several weak peaks during that time (as we pass through the different streams) and the main peak happening at about 3:30 AM.  Unfortunately this meteor shower could be a real dud - even with a clear, dark sky we might not see any meteors at all!  On the other hand, there is the possibility that we could be in for an all out meteor storm (1,000 meteors or more per hour)!  Meteor storms are rare but they do happen - some of us here in the mountains saw the 2001 Leonids storm which brought 3,600 meteors per hour (on average one meteor per second)!

You won't need a telescope to see the meteors, but we'll have them set up out there anyway to take full advantage of the dark sky location.  With clear skies we'll have great views of Mars and Saturn and a sky full of galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters!  We invite the public to join us at this meteor watch party!  For more info about these events and driving directions to our International Dark Sky Park please see our website at www.blueridgeastronomygroup.com.  Happy (meteor) trails!