The radiant of this swarm, i.e. the place from which the meteors seem to fly out in the sky, is located east of the two brightest stars of the constellation Gemini: the stars Castor and Pollux.
In the December sky, the Geminids appear as early as evening twilight and rise high above the southern horizon during the night, where they peak after midnight. The most meteors can therefore always be expected between midnight and 4 am. Meteors are slow and often relatively bright, with the increasing height of the radiant, the frequency of the shower also increases.
The maximum swarm occurs on the night of December 13 to Saturday 14, specifically on Saturday at 2:00 CET.
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Moon and clouds
Unfortunately, the entire show will be somewhat disturbed by the Moon, which will shine practically all night in the phase just one day before the full moon, so we will see fewer meteors.
“So it’s worth looking especially in the second half of the night, specifically between midnight and 4 a.m., when the constellation Gemini peaks and the swarm is at its maximum. Despite the light of the Moon, it will be possible to see at least bright meteors, their frequency could be around 40 per hour under these conditions,” summarized astronomy popularizer and astrophotographer Petr Horálek from the Institute of Physics of the University of Silesia in Opava.
However, another certain complication can be the weather. “I am afraid that low cloud cover in most areas will be even worse than the Moon. The Czech Republic will be covered by that cloud, only the mountain tops will be clear. So we have to go to the mountains,” answered meteorologist Dagmar Honsová to Novinek’s question about the conditions for observing Geminids provided by the current weather.
We can also add that the parent body of the Geminid swarm is the planet (3200) Phaeton, which is apparently a former and now extinct comet.
Meteor shower is generally a phenomenon in which a stream of particles of interplanetary dust (meteoroids) crosses the Earth’s orbit and these particles then enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, they quickly heat up due to friction when passing through it, evaporate and create glowing trails behind them. We call them meteors, popularly known as “shooting stars” or “flying stars”. During the year, we can observe several meteor showers, the most active of which are the Quadrantids in January, the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December.
Pavel Suchan, Czech Astronomical Society
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