Tonight the Lion may roar or merely tweet.
Here is the scene for an American location as the radiant of the most famously unpredictable of meteor showers climbs into view around midnight.
A meteor shower’s radiant is the point or small area from which the incandescent streaks appear to fly out to any part of the sky.
The Leonid stream, dusty debris shed from periodic comet 55P Tempel-Tuttle, hits us head-on, therefore on the morning side of Earth, which is why most of the meteors are seen after midnight.
You may count only around 10 an hour, or, this year, fewer since a bright Moon is high, in Taurus. But in a few years Earth has passed through clumps in this stream so dense as to yield the most fantastic meteor storms in history – thousands per second!
Home Planet Department
Lions are on the “red list” of declining population: they have halved since their grassland habitat across Africa and Asia has become fragmented. Part of the on-going Sixth Extinction.
A few minutes ago a Facebook growl was uttered. If the link doesn’t work for you and you wish to see the text of the growl, ask me and I’ll send it.
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.
One way: right-click, and choose ”View image” or ”Open image in new tab”, then enlarge. Or choose ”Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or, if you click ‘Refresh’ or press function key 5, you’ll see the latest version.