“The Sky This Week” appears every Tuesday. It is written by Ian Clarke, Director of the Hatter Planetarium at Gettysburg College. The planetarium offers regular educational presentations about the stars and the skies; there’s something for early elementary through adults. Field trip requests are welcome. NOTE: field trip request form for Fall 2022 is now live, and the schedule of free public shows has been posted.
The Sky this Week, October 18-25
How many “shooting stars” have you seen? They aren’t stars at all, of course. They are meteors; small bits of space dust burning up in the earth’s atmosphere. An observant person staring up at a dark sky can see two to seven meteors an hour on any given night, according to the American Meteor Society, as thousands of tons of space debris hit the earth every year. Sometimes the earth moves through an especially dense field of space dust, such as when it passes through the orbital path of a comet. We call these meteor showers, and one occurs this week, the Orionid meteor shower, which is predicted to peak in the early morning hours of October 21. It’s not a major meteor shower, accounting for up to twenty meteors per hour under the best of circumstances, but it’s worth checking out. This year the moon is out of the way, not rising until 5:00 AM. To see the Orionids, go out after midnight away from artificial lights and let your eyes dark adapt for at least ten minutes. Though the shower is named for the constellation they “radiate” from, they can appear anywhere in the sky.
Ian Clarke is the director of the Hatter Planetarium at Gettysburg College. In addition he has taught introductory astronomy labs and first-year writing there for over 30 years (not necessarily all at the same time). He was educated at Biglerville High School, the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa. He lives in Gettysburg.