FORECAST: METEOR SHOWERS POSSIBLE

Lunareclipse1

That’s a picture of the full lunar eclipse — full in some parts of the world, that is, but not this part — taken early Tuesday morning from an undisclosed bedroom in Red Bank.

But you knew it was Red Bank, right? What would a photo on redbankgreen be without the Red Bank angle?

Anyway, whether or not you caught that astronomical treat, there’s another one coming Saturday: a meteor shower.

Maybe.

We got this bit of info from the ‘Skywatch’ column of the San Antonio Express-News:

We end our week with a meteor shower that may or may not materialize. The Aurigid Meteor Shower is rare and predictions forecast a peak of meteor activity a couple of hours before sunrise Saturday.

This is not the best shower of the year, but it does have a certain amount of mystery since not that much is known about it.

The source of this rare shower is Comet Keiss (C/1911 N1). Keiss is a long-period comet that swept through the solar system sometime around 83 B.C. The debris field may have worked its way toward Earth and we might see the result this weekend in a display of meteors.

The Star-Ledger also has a good explainer.

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