Orion Meteor Shower

I heard over the radio that this weekend is the Orion meteor shower. These meteor showers happen once a year and usually are named after the constellation where it occurs. These meteor showers don’t really look like it is raining meteors, but you may get to see one or two or more shooting stars in a night. Shooting stars are not really stars but small objects like rocks that when are captured by the earth’s gravity and accelerates, they generate enough heat to melt them up and being small, they don’t have the opportunity to even reach the earth’s land or sea surface.

Meteor showers that make more than one occurrence of these shooting stars more than once in a night are usually the fragments of a comet left behind from the path a comet takes. And since these comets have a fixed path, so do their fragments have a fixed location and when the earth passes by this path, this is when we see the meteor showers.

Problem is I do not know where to look. I used to have a software on my computer that shows all constellations in the night sky, but I uninstalled it. I usually ask Mike Lopez who has a telescope at home and knows his constellations well but he was offline. I tried searching, and Google was just not that updated with the current sites talking about the meteor shower. And maybe it is about time to buy my own telescope too. And this brings me to thought of all these other stuff I want to buy, like a night vision cameras and binocular cameras. But maybe I’ll do these next time when I have a house with a big back yard to set things up and will probably get into astronomical photography. I think that would be cool.

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