Meteor Showers

Thursday 9 a.m.

The Geminid meteor shower should be visible throughout the Northeast tonight for sky watchers away from city lights. The meteors that streak across the sky come from a stream of dusty debris from a comet named 3200 Phaethon. According to NASA scientist Bill Cooke, another meteor shower could appear tonight. This would be debris from Comet Wirtanen, which was discovered in 1948. It is not known if the the potential meteors actually exist because this is the first time Earth is traveling through a region of space where the debris stream would be. In an article on the site http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/11dec_newshower/, it is stated that in dark rural areas more than 120 meteors per hour may be seen tonight.

The video today shows a forecast scenario that takes us through much of next week and adds Christmas Eve. There is a lot of uncertainty about the storm situation early in the week.

One other thing, if you are being interviewed by a reporter from TV, radio, a newspaper or an online journalist at accuweather.com, remember to treat the media right.

And, if you don't want to stand out in the cold, I have taken the only known (to me) picture of a comet over a coastline: