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*It'll shake your nerves and rattle your brain:
This morning will be the peak of the Southern Taurid meteor shower. Already making headlines around the world for producing fireballs, the Taurids will be best visible in the earlier evening hours before moonrise. The radiant for this shower is, of course, the constellation of Taurus and red giant Aldeberan, but did you know the Taurids are divided into two streams? *---->It is surmised that the original parent comet shattered as it passed our Sun around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. The larger "chunk" continued orbiting and is known as periodic comet Encke. The remaining debris field turned into smaller asteroids, meteors and larger fragments that often pass through our atmosphere creating astounding "fireballs" known as bolides.<----* Although the fall rate for this particular shower is rather low at 7 per hour, these slow traveling meteors (27km or 17 miles per second) are usually very bright and appear to almost "trundle" across the sky. With the chances high all week of seeing a bolide, this makes a bit of quiet contemplation under the stars a worthy evening.
*Best visible in -earlier- evening hours, before Moonrise...thank goodness (most are wee-hours-of-the-morning occurrences).
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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