Atlas comet: Why this weekend is best time to see comet, meteor shower
PHILADELPHIA - This weekend would be a great time to look for a comet in your night sky.
The Weather Authority says we'll have clear skies this weekend, and the best time to look for the comet is just after dusk.
Sunset is around 6:15 p.m. these days, and it's pretty dark by 7 p.m.
The early evening sky will stay very dark this weekend because the moon keeps rising later and later. Look for it to come up after 7 p.m. on Saturday and after 8 p.m. on Sunday.
Turns out, only the full moon is up all night. At other times of the night, the moon comes up at different times.
With darker skies, it'll be easier to find the comet in your west sky and to take a picture of it with your cell phone's night sight settings.
By using night mode, so that the picture is taken slowly over the course of three to ten seconds, the comet's tail will show up in your picture better.
If you're not sure how to turn night setting on, there are often tutorials, like this one for the iPhone, if you do some Googling.
Once the moon comes up, it'll stay up in the sky for the rest of the night and into the morning skies, even after the sun comes up.
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The moon is still super big and bright and, because of that, it'll be harder to see the annual October meteor shower.
Still, this weekend is a great time to look for it.
This meteor shower is caused by a comet, but not the one we're seeing in the early evening sky.
It's caused by the dust left in space from Halley's Comet. That comet will be visible in our skies again in 2061.
In the meantime, every year when the earth runs into where Halley's Comet crossed our part of space, some of the comet dust, often the size of sand grains, falls to the Earth.
This rock dust agitates the air way up in our sky and gives it a bit more energy. The air there isn't designed to have extra energy, so it gives it off as a glow of light. The light we see is a shooting star.
Nothing is actually burning up when you see a meteor.
The dust that leads to the air giving off flashes of light just gets smaller and smaller as it falls. Eventually, it'll get so small, you won't even see it. This is why we don't get any souvenirs in the yard from meteor showers.
The best time to see the meteor shower will be Sunday and Monday morning between 2 and 6 a.m. This is when the number of shooting stars peak.
We have a shot to view a shooting star about once or twice every half hour. Look east, the same part of your sky where the sun rises.
There, you'll see a cluster of stars known as Orion. Because the meteors originate there, October's round of shooting stars is named after them. It's called the Orionid Meteor Shower.