Shooting stars
could top one
each second
on Nov. 17

Star-Bulletin staff

Islanders may see a spectacular sky show from the Leonid meteor shower Nov. 17, says the director of Bishop Museum's Center for Space Education.

Then again, Ken Miller says, "Leonid predicting is not an exact science."

The planetarium is getting a lot of calls from people asking about the shower, which occurs when Earth plows through debris left by comet P/Tempel-Tuttle each year, he said.

Earth's orbit heads toward the constellation Leo about Nov. 17.

A study of Leonid meteor showers since the year 902 shows they vary greatly, with the strongest intensity every 33.1 years, Miller said.

He said Mike Jones, who works at the planetarium, was at an Army flight school in Texas when the Leonid meteor shower occurred in November 1966.

"I was sitting out on the barracks steps, polishing my boots, when I happened to look up," Jones recalled.

"I blinked a few times and couldn't really believe what I was seeing. Hundreds of meteors, all over the sky. . . . It quite simply 'rained fire' for about two hours, and then, just as quietly as it started, it dropped back into a normal night."

Instead of the 40 meteors per hour seen during a typical Leonid meteor shower, observers estimated there were 40 per second that time, Miller said.

This year, he said, scientists believe Earth will enter the heaviest concentration of space debris when China is pointed toward it. People there could see as many as 10,000 meteors per hour, astronomers say.

They say Hawaii will see an increase in meteors from 2 a.m. to sunrise - probably about 100 per hour instead of 40, Miller said.

But if Earth's passage through the swarm is a few hours earlier than predicted, "Hawaii could be heading straight into the swarm," he said.

Look everywhere in the sky and don't use binoculars or telescopes, he advised.