Starwatch

Next weekend you can catch one of the best meteor showers of the year. It’s the annual Geminid meteor shower, and if the clouds stay away from Butler, it should be a good one this year, because the moon will be mostly out of the sky.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth runs into a debris trail of dust and small pebbles as it orbits around the sun. For most meteor showers, the debris is left behind by a passing comet, but the Geminids are unusual because the debris trail was left behind by an asteroid dubbed by astronomers as 3200 Phaethon.

This asteroid was discovered in 1983 and is thought to have a diameter of around 3 miles. It has a highly elliptical orbit that swings it by our part of the solar system every year and a half. Each time it passes it refreshes the debris trai

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