Jaunted

This year will be a pretty good one to witness the intergalactic spectacle, according to the brainy science guys at National Geographic, who recommend that residents of North America and Europe venture out to a dark place between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. ET on the 17th to see between 30 to 50 meteors an hour. Stargazers in Asia will have the best views, though, as the Leonids will be peaking at 50 meteors an hour in the predawn hours.

Scientifically, a meteor shower happens when the earth passes through the debris field left in the wake of a comet that has passed close to the sun, melting some of its ice and shaking off chunks of various sizes. Most meteor showers are relatively modest, with rates of 50 meteors an hour on a good year, but some meteor showers are truly breathtaking. The Leonid Shower of 1833, for example, had as many as a hundred thousand meteors an hour, or an average of 30 meteors per second, which must have freaked people out something fierce, especially without modern science to explain what was happening.

The Leonids get their name from the Constellation Leo, where the debris comes from, not, as I had thought, from Leonid Brezhnev, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But regardless of what they're called, they're darn cool, so if you find yourself staggering out of a bar late Monday night, know that those streaks of light in the sky aren't just a product of your evening's libations. I wonder how well I'll be able to see it from Brooklyn.

[Photo: National Geographic]

Related Stories:
· 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower [National Geographic]
· Stargazing [Jaunted]