'Giraffe' meteor shower could light up Bay Area skies

Becky Bach bbach@mercurynews.com

Posted: 05/22/2014 09:08:20 AM PDT

Updated: 05/22/2014 09:23:51 AM PDT

bbach@mercurynews.com

A fantastic meteor shower might splash the skies around midnight Friday. Or, it might not.

'The shower is really a mystery,' said Peter Jenniskens, a meteor expert at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. 'Nobody can tell what's going to happen.'

If it's on, the sky could light up with as many 200 shooting stars an hour, topping the Perseid meteor shower, an annual August show with up to 100 meteors per hour.

The shower that may or may not be stems from the trail of dust from an old comet astronomers call 209P/LINEAR, a chunk of ice, dust and rock that was first discovered in 2004.

Just like a dog shedding fur, comets leave bits behind them. Late Friday and early Saturday, the Earth will pass through the comet's trail. The Earth will hit the pieces the comet shed more than 200 years ago. And if the comet was shedding heavily in the 18th and 19th century, then stargazers are in for a treat, astronomers say.

This meteor shower is possible thanks to the thrust of massive Jupiter, which tweaked the comet's path and pushed some of its debris into Earth's orbit. But if it didn't drop many specks of rock and dust, then there won't be much to light up the skies.

Nonetheless, it's worth stepping outside to take a peek, said Rick Baldridge, a Campbell resident who is vice president of the Peninsula Astronomical Society.

'Meteor showers are the type of thing anybody can just walk outside and look straight up,' Baldridge said.

The club isn't hosting a viewing party due to the late-night hour, but Baldridge said he's planning to count and photograph meteors.

As this is the first time for this particular meteor shower, professional astronomers will look to the leagues of amateurs to gain as much information as they can, said Bill Cooke, NASA's meteor guru at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

'This is still unknown territory for scientists,' said Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at Foothill College.

The meteors are bits of dust and rock ranging in size from a grain of sand to a marble. The debris is as much as five billion years old and could provide a glimpse into the formation of the solar system, Fraknoi said. They will crash into Earth's atmosphere at 36,000 miles per hour, flashing across the sky as atmospheric friction burns them up, Cooke said.

Although 36,000 miles per hour sounds fast, it is actually quite slow moving for a meteor, Jenniskens said. This meteor shower has particular meaning for him: soon after the comet was discovered in 2004, Jenniskens was the first calculate the potential for a meteor shower this year.

'It's fun 10 years later to see everybody get all excited about it,' he said.

He's trying to work his way into a plane to get a better view of the display. If that doesn't work, Jenniskens said he'll head to Fremont Peak, near Hollister, one of the sites in a Bay Area-based video surveillance project called CAMS that he leads, to learn about meteor showers.

Comet 209P/LINEAR swings around the sun every five years. It's currently isn't shedding much material, Cooke said. Coincidentally, the comet will come within 3.7 million miles of Earth, its closest point, on May 29.

The meteors will appear to originate in from a constellation near the Little Dipper called Camelopardalis, which means 'camel-leopard' and is a 19th century description of a giraffe. Astronomers deemed the shower the Camelopardalids.

Even though they're excited, astronomers are trying to cap the hype on the less-than-certain display.

'Despite all my computer models and all the meteor cameras, I wasn't around 200 years ago,' NASA's Cooke said. 'Your guess is as good as mine.'

Bay Area viewers should get a clear view of the sky, but those on the coast will probably be fogged in, said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

Between 8 p.m. and midnight Friday, NASA will be live streaming the shower and Cooke will be online to answer questions at: http://ift.tt/1oVUfl0

Contact Becky Bach at 408-920-5862. Follow Becky Bach at http://ift.tt/1kI7EfD.

Camelopardalid Meteor Shower Viewing peak: 11 p.m., May 23 to 1 a.m., May 24 Pronunciation: camel-oh-par-DAL-idz, or gir-affe. Where to look: Up. Meteors will originate in the northern constellation Camelopardalis located near the Little Dipper, but should cover the sky. Origin: 200-year-old dust from Comet 209P/LINEAR Meteor size: 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter Speed: 36,000 miles per hour (that's slow, for a meteor) Number: As many as 200 per hour