Explanation:
What's happening in the sky over
Monument Valley?
A meteor shower.
Over the past weekend the
Leonid meteor shower has
been peaking.
The image -- actually a composite of six exposures of about 30 seconds
each -- was taken in 2001, a year when there was a much more active
Leonids shower.
At that time, Earth was moving through a particularly dense swarm
of sand-sized debris from
Comet Tempel-Tuttle,
so that meteor rates approached one visible streak per second.
The meteors
appear parallel because they all fall to Earth from the
meteor shower radiant --
a point on the sky towards the constellation of the Lion
(Leo).
Although the predicted peak of
this year's
Leonid meteor shower is over,
another peak may be visible early tomorrow morning.
By the way --
how many meteors can you identify
in the above image?
