One Of The Most Beautiful Nights Of The Year Awaits Belarusians

• 1.12.2025, 23:09

It will be possible to see up to 10 meteors per hour.

The end of the year in Belarus will be marked by the Ursids meteor shower, which will peak on the night of December 21-22 - the first night of astronomical winter after the December solstice. Ursids are small streams: usually you can see about 10 meteors per hour. But the long winter nights in Belarus create good conditions for observations - especially away from city lights, writes smartpress.by.

The majority of meteor streams are related to comets. The parent body of the Ursids is the periodic comet 8P/Tuttle. We can observe them every time the Earth passes through the trail of debris left by this comet. Comet 8P/Tuttle was last seen in the inner solar system in 2021, and will not return until 2035.

The best time to look at the sky is late at night or near dawn, when the stream's radiant, located near the constellation of the Little Bear, rises higher above the northern horizon. Despite the small number of meteors, Ursids will be a good opportunity for space enthusiasts to end the year under the quiet glow of "shooting stars".

The night of December 13-14 will be the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, the brightest and most active shower of the year. When the sky is clear you can see up to 150 meteors per hour, that is almost three "shooting stars" every minute.

Geminids stand out among other streams: they annually appear in mid-December and exceed in intensity even Perseids. Their peculiarity is that they did not arise from a comet, but from the fragments of the asteroid Phaethon - a huge rocky object with a diameter of about 6 kilometers, leaving a trail of particles.