What is a Shooting Star?
Have you ever had experience observing a so-called “shooting star”? Today, we will explore this majestic natural phenomenon and share with you how to increase your chances of seeing one.
What are shooting stars?
A shooting star is a meteoroid, a fragment of an asteroid or a comet, made up of iron, silicates or a mixture of both.
Pretend you’re on an asteroid. Something causes an explosion or a sudden impact, and the asteroid shatters into pieces. Lucky for us, the piece we landed on is a meteoroid, and right now it’s caught in the Earth’s gravitational pull. As we’re drawn through the Earth’s atmosphere, a lot of friction is created. This friction heats our meteoroid and makes it shine. And in that glow, we sail across the sky.
Now, meteoroids behave differently when they reach Earth’s atmosphere. The large ones are called fireballs, and when they enter the atmosphere they will have a big bright head and tail. Bolides will explode in the air, while still others will come down in showers – meteor showers to be precise. No matter how they enter the atmosphere, most small meteoroids disintegrate and fall to Earth as dust.
How can I see a shooting star?
The truth is that it’s a bit of a challenging process, especially, if you live in big polluted cities, such as New York, Berlin or Hon-Kong. However, if you are patient enough, it can be achieved. American Meteor Society states that you could see 2 to 16 meteors in a very dark site, but none if you’re located in a place that suffers from light pollution. That’s why in order to increase your chances of seeing a shooting star, you might wanna go to rural areas, deserts, deep forests, and places far-far away from massive metropolises.
Essentially, if you want to see a shooting star, it all boils down to these basic tips:
- Look up at the sky at the right time:
- When the meteor shower takes place, shooting stars are the most frequent.
- When the moon’s phase is the closest to the new moon it makes the sky darker, which slightly increases your chances of spotting shooting stars.
- The hours before dawn.
- Pick the right place. Here’s a pretty neat tool that can help you to find really dark sites, from which you can observe the majestic skyline with falling stars.
That should conclude it. If you still have questions about shooting stars, feel free to reach out to us via the contact form.
P.S. If you name a star in our star registry, it will never fall 😉
