Meteoroids up to three feet (one meter) long can be seen destroying the world during the Taurid meteor shower
This weekend will bring a wonderful display of "fireball" meteors to the night sky, so it's almost time to break out the camp site and a bottle of tea and experience the amazing perspective.
A meteor shower could send fireballs across the sky this week
The South Taurida meteor shower is set to peak on Sunday and Monday, giving observers a chance to see what are in many cases called shooting stars soaring above our planet.
According to the American Meteor Society, the South Taurid meteor shower has been dynamic since September and should reach peak action this week.
"Space rocks" and other material hurtling through space—including chunks of space rocks, comets, and surprisingly, the Moon or Mars—are called meteoroids. Meteoroids that enter Earth's climate are called meteors.
The Taurid meteor shower, which includes both the South Taurids and the North Taurids, originates from Comet Enke, a 2.98 massive body that circles the Sun simply like clockwork.
The South Taurids and North Taurids, which peak next Saturday, represent a spike in fireball reports each year between September and November, the AMS said.
"Fireball" - in all honesty - is the term NASA actually uses to describe meteors that sparkle as brightly or more beautifully than Venus.
If you'd like to try to spot the Taurid fireball this week, Space.com suggests finding a blunt survey point away from light contamination and scanning the night sky around Jupiter.
What's more, exercise restraint: while the Taurids can produce some exceptionally brilliant fireballs, they probably produce around five meteors every hour.
The Taurid meteor shower peaks from November 12-13, when observers in the UK can see up to five shooting stars consistently.
Meteoroids up to three feet (one meter) long can be seen destroying the world in mid-air as they pass through Comet Encke's debris cloud.
On the northern side of the equator, these abnormally slow falling stars will be visible until the tenth of December, but this end of the week will see their best grouping.
The best part is that the researchers accept that you won't need any additional hardware to see this amazing display because you can see the meteors with your own independent eyes.
Stargazer at the Illustrious Observatory Greenwich Dr. Greg Earthy colored notes that a meteor shower occurs around a similar time consistently due to common examples of space debris.
"The moment Earth passes through the haze of debris left by a comet or space rock in our planetary group, bits of rock and debris will be cleaned up and collide with our air to create a beautiful flash of light in our sky: a meteor," he told MailOnline.
"These meteor showers occur at somewhat unsurprising times in our year and will appear to start in a particular patch of our sky depending on the direction the Earth is moving at the time."
Over the past 20,000 to 30,000 years, the much larger comet is thought to have slowly broken off, turning into the Taurid shower and Comet Encke.
Comets come close to the Sun on their excursion through a planetary group, causing some of their surface to rapidly change from thick ice to gaseous fog.
Because these nebulae stay in a similar area in the Earth's ring, meteor showers appear to start in a similar place in the night sky as clockwork.
The meteor shower known as the Tauride meteor shower gets its name because the meteors appear to come from the Taurus group of stars.
Because they move in sequence and are beautiful, meteors seen during the Taurid shower are especially visible to the naked eye.
Since most of them are arranged as "fireballs", they appear brighter than Venus, which is the second most spectacular feature in the night sky after the Moon.
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