Geminid Meteor Shower 2024: Online Watching – December 13, 2024 – YouTube
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The Geminid meteor shower reaches its peak this evening (December 13), but if you’re unable to witness the intense shower in person, you can still enjoy this spectacular event from the comfort of your own home.
Astronomer Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project offers a free live stream Geminid meteor shower on December 13, starting at 6:00 p.m. EST (2300 GMT), weather permitting.
You can watch all the action here on Space.com, courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project, or directly on their website WebTV page or YouTube channel .
Unfortunately this year the bright near-Full moon will wash out the fainter meteors, but we can still expect some impressive Geminids.
“While this shower produces 100 meteors per hour at its peak under dark skies, we can probably expect 15 this time Shooting stars per hour,” according to Masi . “We will set up special, very large field of view equipment in Manciano under the darkest sky in Italy and share the brightest meteors in real time!” Masi continued.
Night sky live
(Image credit: Daisy Dobrijevic/Canva)
Stay up to date on what you can see tonight with our night sky live blog.
The Geminid meteor shower is considered one of the brightest and most reliable meteor shower events of the year. From the Virtual Telescope Project’s livestream from Manciano, Italy, dark skies give observers the best chance of catching a glimpse of an impressive Geminid, regardless the bright moon .
Geminds are unusual because, unlike other meteor showers that form from debris from comets, they are created by pieces of the near-Earth object 3200 Phaethon, an asteroid that may have collided with another object in the distant past and created a stream of meteor debris . The strange asteroid behaves like one comet and orbits the sun every 1.4 years. As Earth passes through the debris left behind by Phaethon, the “asteroid crumbs” heat up as they enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in bright flashes of light.
If you’d like more advice on photographing the Geminids, check out our guide to photographing meteors and meteor showers. If you need imaging gear, consider our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.
Editor’s note : If you capture a stunning view of the Geminid meteor shower or another night sky view that you would like to share with Space.com for a possible story or gallery, send images and comments to: spacephotos@space.com .