This Week, Indonesia's Sky Is Decorated With Meteor Lyrid At Night

Illustration (Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Meteor showers will decorate the night sky this week. Dubbed the Lyrid meteor, the show kicks off on the evening of Sunday 19 April, and culminates in the evening of Wednesday 22 April. The sight of this meteor will cross the skies of Indonesia and around the world.

Unlike 2019, this Lyrid Meteor will look brighter than the moon.

According to the American Meteor Society, based on locations in various parts of the world, the Lyrid meteor can be seen late at night or early morning until April 25.

The Lyrid meteor shower starts tonight. Grabbing my camera. #backgarden #PHOTOS #meteorshower #Astrophotography #NightPhotography #Space #Nikon #photographer pic.twitter.com/tAKZAKRfrv

- Brian Jenkins (@imagewichman) April 16, 2020

Before midnight will be the best time to see this meteor. Because, the metor will be slower and longer as it passes horizontally in the sky, which are called earthgrazers. Some of them had traces that glowed for a few seconds after the meteor disappeared.

"An annual meteor shower, this is the first to really catch the eye, one that you can organize a self-viewing party with a significant chance of success," said the authors of Observe Meteors published by the Astronomical League, David Levy and Stephen Edberg.

Typically, a Lyrid meteor shower can show anywhere from 10 to 20 meteors per hour at its peak, but it is difficult to predict how many will be seen. However, on Wednesday night at the peak of this year's meteor shower, there will be about ten meteors per hour seen.

According to the Space report, meteor showers (not just Lyrid) occur every year when Earth's orbit crosses the path of Comet Thatcher. The comet is losing part of itself that is flying into Earth's upper atmosphere at a speed of 110,000 miles per hour.

In 1867, Professor Edmond Weiss in Vienna noticed that the orbit of Comet Thatcher seemed to almost coincide with Earth around April 20 as well. That same year, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle confirmed the relationship between this comet and Lyrids.

So, Lyrid is this comet's legacy, the meteors seen from this display are tiny particles that the comet shed on previous visits through the inner solar system.

For information, the name Lyrid comes from the constellation Lyra. According to Earthsky, this Lyrid meteor shower is one of the oldest known, with a record of meteors seen going back 2,700 years.

If you want to see the Lyrid meteor shower, you need to be in a location that is at a height of a building or a large enough field without obstruction of houses and other buildings. Lyrid's Meteor can be seen with the naked eye, and it doesn't require any assistive tools like a telescope, or just use your cellphone to zoom into the sky.

Even impressive things will happen during this Lyrid meteor shower. According to NASA, there will be appearances like the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars in the sky. This won't happen again for a few years.