🌠 🦁 HOMESCHOOL ASTRONOMY: Leonid Meteors for November

The annual Leonid meteor shower peaks each year around 16–18 November, so the next few days will be the time to be on the lookout — make the Leonids an annual homeschool tradition. You can get some quick facts and observing recommendations by entering your location at timeanddate.com:

• ➢ Leonid Meteor Shower (timeanddate.com)

This year, unfortunately, Leonid viewing will probably not be very good because the moon will be nearly full on the peak nights. The meteors will all still be there, of course, but the brightness of the moon will wash most of them out. But that of course is an educational lesson in itself, and it will still be worthwhile going out for a look. What you want to do is position yourself so that the moon is behind a building or tree and then look not exactly in the direction of Leo itself but off to the side — that may let you see the longer trails of the brighter meteors. (And as always, be sure to give your eyes at least ten minutes to adjust to the darkness: don’t look at the moon or any other bright lights, including your phone!)

The Leonids, as their name suggests, appear to radiate from the constellation Leo. Pages 130–133 in your recommended backyard star guide will help you teach a good basic meteor lesson, and the charts in the guide and in your world atlas will help you identify Leo (although you don’t actually have to locate the Heavenly Lion himself to watch for meteors in that general region of the sky).

Meteor showers like the Leonids occur when the earth, in its orbit around the sun, passes through the trail of debris left behind by a comet — that’s why they occur at the same time each year, once per annual orbit. The website of the American Meteor Society (amsmeteors.org) contains a wealth of additional information — here are some of their resources:

• ➢ Meteor Showers — Introduction (amsmeteors.org)
• ➢ Meteors — Frequently Asked Questions (amsmeteors.org)
• ➢ Meteor Shower Calendar (amsmeteors.org)

The Leonids are a particularly famous meteor shower because they have played an important role in history, both scientific and cultural. The parent object of the Leonids is comet Tempel–Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 33 years. That means that the Leonids are especially abundant, on average, every 33 years, right after Tempel–Tuttle leaves a fresh trail of debris. On those occasions they sometimes produce a meteor storm, with thousands or even tens of thousands of meteors visible every hour. One such storm occurred over North America in 1833. It was accorded religious significance by many people at the time, and in the scientific community this storm provided important new insights into the relationship between meteor showers and comets.

There is a truly remarkable interactive animation of the Leonid meteor shower and its parent comet available from the website meteorshowers.org. Until recently, interactive animations of this kind would have been available only on the most advanced computers, but now you can examine them with a laptop from the comfort of your little home academy. 💻

Note that this animation is fully interactive: by dragging and scrolling across the screen you can tilt the plane of the solar system to view it from above or below, and you can zoom in on the earth’s or the comet’s orbit. (The earth is the blue planet, orbiting third from the sun.)

Pay a nighttime visit to a dark-sky location near your homeschool in the next few days, look to the lion, and see what shooting stars you can see. And if perchance the meteors fail, enjoy our beautiful moon. 🌖

What celestial sights and astronomical alignments have you and your students examined in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Meteors through the year: We take special note of three meteor showers each year in the River Houses: the Leonids in November, the Geminids in December, and the Perseids in August. But there are many other smaller meteor showers that occur regularly all through the year, and they’re well worth looking for, especially if you live in a dark-sky location. The annual meteor calendars available from the American Meteor Society and timeanddate.com will show you when and where to look for them. 🌠

❡ All the star-sown sky: Teaching your students the major constellations and the names of the principal stars is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Our recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas both contain charts of the constellations that will help you learn your way around the heavens. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time with your students beneath the starry vault. ✨

❡ The starry archipelagoes: For a great weekly astronomical essay, perfect for older homeschoolers, pay a visit to “The Sky This Week” from the U.S. Naval Observatory. These well-written pages usually focus on one or two special astronomical events or phenomena. If you have high school astronomy students, have them read these pages aloud to you each week, or ask them to study them and then narrate a summary back to you. 🌌

❡ Star bright: If you’d like some light and easy homeschool astronomy lessons, download and print a copy of our annual River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us month by month as we make twelve heavenly friends-for-life over the course of the year. 🌟

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Subscribe to our free River Houses newsletter to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡