Home > Ephemeris Program, Meteor Shower > 12/14/2015 – Ephemeris – The Geminids reach peak today – See ’em morning or evening

12/14/2015 – Ephemeris – The Geminids reach peak today – See ’em morning or evening

December 14, 2015

Ephemeris for Monday, December 14th.  The Sun will rise at 8:12.  It’ll be up for 8 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 5:02.   The Moon, 3 days past new, will set at 8:42 this evening.

The Geminid meteor shower is ongoing right now.  The peak is expected to be near 1 p.m. today.  So the numbers seen this morning while it’s still dark should be about the same as will be seen this evening.  Not peak numbers, but it should be a good show nonetheless if it’s clear tonight.  The radiant is in the constellation of Gemini above Orion.  The source of this shower is an asteroid rather than a comet.  It may be a burnt out comet which lost all its frozen gasses.  It has a definite highly elliptical orbit of a comet and comes very close to the Sun, where one of the STEREO Sun monitoring spacecraft saw it ejecting a cloud of dust.  It may be classed as a rock comet for that reason, blurring the line between comets and asteroids.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

All sky

All Sky view one hour intervals for The Geminid meteor shower the night of December 13-14, 2015.. Note the radiant “GemR”. Created with my LookingUp program and GIMP.

Geminid

A Geminid and the aurora borealis from Norway. Found this in a NASA blog (link below) uncredited). However I was able to find the credit: Image Credit & Copyright: Bjørnar G. Hansen.

The image above was also an Astronomy Picture of the Day.  Here’s a link to the NASA blog dated December 9, 2015 about live tweeting the Geminids.

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