If you live in a big city, you should consider going to the suburbs to avoid urban light pollution. The first step, of course, is to go somewhere dark enough to see the shooting stars. Since major meteor showers occur at predictable times relative to the Earth’s orbit, it is possible to plan a shooting star observation. Some of the most intense meteor showers can produce 100 shooting stars in less than an hour! These are predictable regions in space where “meteor showers” take place in the sky.
While more than 25 million such micrometeoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere every single day, the most prominent ones occur when Earth’s orbit around the Sun intersects a comet’s orbit. When these space rocks enter the atmosphere, they leave bright streaks in their wake as they burn up in the night sky. The first kind, the micrometeoroids, are the ones that amateur astronomers most look forward to admiring. They land on the surface and form craters… these are classified as meteorites. While the smaller meteoroids will burn at high altitudes in the atmosphere, the larger and heavier ones contain a large core made of iron which cannot be vaporized by atmospheric friction (also known as atmospheric drag). Occasionally, some of these rocks are flung toward the Earth and enter its atmosphere. These meteoroids come from asteroids and comets – pieces of space rock that floats about in between the planets and orbit the sun with them.ĭuring their journey, some pieces of rock and dust break off from them due to changes in temperature as they get closer and further from the Sun.
Shooting stars are glowing streaks of light produced by small pieces of space rock and dust when they enter the atmosphere at high speed.