Gonna be in the Eastern Hemisphere a week from now? Be sure to stay up late Tuesday Night, Nov 17, into Wednesday morning. The Leonid meteor shower is expected to peak with 200-500 meteoroids per hour (for someone looking straight up and not blinking), about 2145 UTC/GMT. See this NASA presentation for more details.This image is from APOD, and is the Astronomy Picture of the Day for 11/27/2002. Taken from Spain, the image is a composite of thirty one-minute exposures (ah, what we can do with digital images now!). The shower was very good along the Atlantic seaboard of the US also, though so late it was still going as the sky lightened for dawn. I watched it for a while, then dragged my family out of bed to watch its last quarter hour until the sky lightened too much. They were sufficiently impressed to forgive me.
Sadly (for me), this year the shower's peak occurs at about 4:45 PM local time. But if the sky is clear, I'll still poke my head out just after midnight (7 hours too late) to see what remnants of the shower there may be.
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