Adrian Dening's Stars Over Somerset

Friday, 5 December 2025 00:06

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 9pm, the bright star Procyon will be easy to spot, with planet Jupiter above it. To the right of them, more towards the south east, the constellation of Orion will be obvious and the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, will be poking its head above the horizon.

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