Monday 8th to Sunday 14th December 2025
Sunday 14th sees the peak of the annual Geminids meteor shower. If you look towards the east around
You should notice two bright stars just above Jupiter - these are Castor and Pollux - the "heads" of the twins in the constellation Gemini.
The radiant point of the meteor shower, where the shooting stars appear to originate from, will be just above Castor.
At its peak, the shower has been known to produce up to 120 meteors per hour, as the bits of space debris enter our atmosphere at a speed approaching 70Km per second. This debris is normally associated with the leftovers of different comets because they melt and produce a "tail" as they approach the Sun, on their long journey from the outer reaches of the Solar System. The Geminids is a little unusual, in that these meteors originate from an Asteroid called Phaethon that is in a highly elliptical orbit in and out of the Asteroid Belt. Being an asteroid, Phaethon is rocky, where your average comet is more like a dirty snowball!
So could some of these bits actually get through the atmosphere without burning up completely and crash into the Earth? If they did, they would be called meteorites, but that's not going to happen as they are only tiny to start with. Something the size of a grain of sand could produce a decent shooting star!
www.starsoversomerset.com
Screenshots courtesy of Stellarium
Copyright Adrian Dening and Radio Ninesprings 2025
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