How to watch tonight’s ‘all-or-nothing’ meteor shower

NYP – A spectacular meteor shower may light up the sky in what astronomers say will be an “all-or-nothing” event overnight on Monday.

For those on or near the Eastern seaboard, NASA says that the best chance to view the tau Herculid shower will be at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, or 10 p.m. on the West Coast.

However, NASA says while there is no moonlight that would obscure the meteors, that still doesn’t guarantee that there will be something to marvel at tonight.

“This is going to be an all-or-nothing event,” Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, said in a report.

“If the debris from SW3 was traveling more than 220 miles per hour when it separated from the comet, we might see a nice meteor shower.”

Meteors are parts of rock and dust that hit the Earth’s atmosphere, heat up and glow. Most vaporize as they descend, but some explode.

Scientists say that the planet will be passing through the debris trail of a broken comet that was first discovered nearly 100 years ago.

The comet is officially known as 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, or SW3. It was named after the two German scientists who first discovered it in 1930 — Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Arthur Wachman.

According to NASA, the comet wasn’t seen again until the late 1970s. In the 1990s, the comet broke into several pieces.

Since then, the comet has broken into dozens of smaller pieces and tiny bits of debris and dust. 

In 2006, the comet was in at least 70 pieces when it approached Earth.