The sky may be filled with thousands of brilliant streaks on Monday night and Tuesday morning.
The event could be a flop.
Sky-watchers are eager with anticipation for the potential spectacle of the Tau Herculids, the best predictions that meteor watchers have for the event.
When the Earth plows into debris from a comet, there can be meteorite showers. There is a comet called 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 or SW3 that is the source of the Tau Herculids. The trifling ice ball was first discovered in 1930 and it only produced a small amount of material to make fireworks. Our planet is about to encounter a large fragment field because SW3 crumbled in 1995.
On the evening of Monday, May 30, and the early morning of Tuesday, May 31, you will be able to see the Tau Herculids in the lower 48. The time is Eastern. The further south you live, the better your view is. Skywatchers in West Africa, the Caribbean and South America are likely to see some action. Those in Alaska are out of luck.
If you want to catch the shower, get away from the bright city lights and find the darkest and clearest location you can, one with few hills or obstacles on the horizon. The light from the moon won't interfere with the display. Allow half an hour for your eyes to adjust.
The best piece of equipment to have is an attic and a beach chair.
The showers appear to come from a point in the sky known as their radiant. The shower was supposed to come from the constellation Hercules, but it turned out to be incorrect.
The bright star Arcturus will be the most visible star in the sky of the Northern Hemisphere at that time. If you can locate the Big Dipper by tracing a line from the last two stars, you can find Arcturus. Arcturus should be the first star you see.
The show will not last long if it occurs at all, unlike the meteor showers that are visible for days before and after a peak night.
Robert Lunsford, the secretary-general of the International Meteor Organization, said that this is not a long-term event. If nothing is happening then it is a non event.
There is no consensus on the $64,000 question. The predictions are all over the place.
NASA models suggest that few or possibly no meteorites will be visible. Mr. Rao points out that there are estimates from people who watch the sky for as many as 10,000 meteors per hour. The Tau Herculids will be one of the biggest displays in recorded history if those are true.
Mr. Lunsford said he would be happy to see one in the entire hour.
The comet's leftover particles and the speed at which they hit the atmosphere will affect the amount of debris.
The particles may be sand-grain-sized.
Slow streaks that are too dim for the human eye to see are possible if the fragments are on the smaller side. Night sky devotees have been burned before when they announce a possible wonder like the supposedly once-in-a-lifetime sight of a comet in 2020.
Mr. Lunsford said that they need a certain set of circumstances to occur for the event to happen. We owe it to the general public to let them know.
Mr. Lunsford said that new meteor showers are rare.
Astronomers began getting phone calls in October 1995 from people claiming to have discovered a new comet. He said that the comet was falling apart and becoming as bright as normal.
He said it was like breaking open an egg.
This will be the first time the Earth will meet all of the material that exploded in 1995.
NASA's telescopes watched the comet fragment for years, but no one is sure what caused SW3 to collapse. It was possible that the icy object made close passes to the hot sun and Jupiter.
The comet finally said, "I can deal with this anymore, I broke up into pieces."
Humans have been shooting stars for millenniums. It is not known when ancient skygazers first associated them with a point in the sky. The author of The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms says that some Indigenous traditions in the Americas may indicate an early understanding of radiants.
The Kiliwa, who are Indigenous people in Baja California, Mexico, say that there is a kind of fiery meteorite coming from a constellation called Xsmii.
If you think of a meteor shower, and you see the spray coming out, it suggests that there was a shower.
Islamic sky watchers recorded a great shower after the death of Abu Ishaq Ibrahim II ibn Ahmad in A.D. 902. They noted that the meteors came from one spot.
The 18th century saw a comet passing by a year before a large storm of meteorites. The shower put on a display that was so spectacular that thousands of shooting stars fell every minute.
There were reports of people falling to the ground in prayer and rushing to church to repentance.
Denison Olmsted, who was an astronomer in Connecticut, was awakened by his neighbors and went out to see the storm. Olmsted asked viewers to send him their own accounts in a letter he wrote to a local newspaper.
After collecting many replies and conducting further investigations, Olmsted concluded that the shower that originated beyond our planet was not the one that came from the Earth's surface.
He should be credited with being the father of meteor science.
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