Photo by Pianoman75.No really, look up! Those are the Leonids streaking through the sky (they began on November 10). This meteor shower often gives one of the best shows of the year, on rare occasions being so spectacular that it surpasses being just a shower and becomes a “meteor storm,” with over 1000 meteors per hour. We won’t get quite that amazing a sight this year, but the debris from comet Tempel-Tuttle should still send about 500 pieces an hour through the atmosphere — and with the peak arriving on Tuesday night and a barely visible waxing Moon to darken the sky, the Leonids will still be an astronomical show worth staying outside in the cold for (perhaps with your camera?).
If you’d like some company, the National Air and Space Museum is a great place to go for some sky watching this Tuesday. The Public Observatory will be open for its first night hours starting at 5:30 p.m. (along with some extra scopes out on the patio from their volunteer astronomers). At 8 p.m., astronaut John Grunsfeld, an astropysicist who was on the final mission to service the Hubble Telescope last May, will speak in the IMAX theater about the significance of the telescope’s work. The primary theater is sold out, but you can still get free tickets for overflow seating. (The speakers often come out to briefly say hello to these guests.)
By the way, I’m reporting this week’s space news directly from the motherland: Cape Canaveral. NASA is holding its fourth “tweetup” this weekend; the first three were at their headquarters in D.C., featuring meet and greets with astronauts who had recently returned from shuttle missions and the first live tweetup from space, where guests got to pose questions to the crew on the International Space Station. The success of NASA’s many, many Twitter feeds (including each mission, space center, and more than ten astronauts) has culminated in a two day Tweetup for the first 100 registrants, who have arrived in Florida for a tour of Kennedy Space Center and viewing of the launch of Atlantis on Monday. This morning, you can see a live stream of our panel of speakers, which includes representatives from Ares I-X and JPL, astronaut Mike Massimino, and science reporter Miles O’Brien on NASA TV via UStream from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. On Tuesday, the space shuttle launch is scheduled for 2:28 p.m. and you can tune in at all the usual places: NASA TV, SpaceflightNow, or SpaceVidcast. (I’ll be watching from, ahem, the media tent a few miles from the launch pad.)
