Geminid meteor shower set to light up skies. Here’s how you can see it

globalnews.ca:

Stargazers are getting ready to witness one of the “most active and reliable meteor showers” of the year light up the skies this week.

The Geminid meteor shower is expected to peak on Thursday but could be visible starting Wednesday night.

The annual spectacle brings a flurry of so-called “shooting stars” streaking through the skies, delivering a meteor as often as one per minute.

Each year, there are six major meteor showers, but the Geminids is considered to be “one of the best and most reliable,” according to NASA.

“Even if you only see one or two meteors, it’s probably something you’ve never seen in your life before, so it’s one of those things that you can check off your bucket list,” John Percy, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto, said in an interview with Global News.

But if the sky is perfectly clear and you’re away from city lights, you could end up seeing “100 or more meteors” per hour, he said. “That’s pretty spectacular.”

The Geminid meteor shower comes from the asteroid 3200 Phaethon and the constellation Gemini is its radiant, or point of origin.

A meteor shower occurs when many meteoroids or space rocks coming from comets and asteroids collide with the Earth’s atmosphere all at once.

When these particles get close to the Sun, they get extremely hot and leave a dusty trail of debris.

So each year as the Earth orbits around the Sun, it also passes through the debris, which quickly burns up when it strikes the upper atmosphere, releasing a glowing streak of hot air.

It takes about one second for a meteor to zip through the sky and convert its energy of motion into the glow of air molecules, Percy said.

“They create a streak in the sky that lasts for maybe a second or