11/15/11 – Ephemeris – Prospects for the Leonid meteor shower
Tuesday, November 15th. The sun will rise at 7:38. It’ll be up for 9 hours and 36 minutes, setting at 5:14. The moon, 3 days before last quarter, will rise at 9:22 this evening.
This is an off peak year for the Leonid meteor shower but astronomers are finding more and more Leonid dust streams. These dust streams are created when the comet, in this case Tempel-Tuttle passes its closest to the sun. They end up preceding or following the comet near its orbit but are affected by the tiny force of sunlight and end up diverging more and more from the comet itself. Three dust streams are expect to be encountered by the earth this year. The stream from the1800 passage of the comet is expected to pass the earth tomorrow afternoon to be picked up as radio echos only. Also Thursday and Friday afternoon there are also expected peaks. All invisible from here, but possibly visible from Asia.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Information gleaned from the International Meteor Organization Meteor Shower Calendar 2011: http://imo.net/calendar/2011.
Leonid meteor radiant
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 
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