Skyward for July 2022 The Meteor Shower that wasn’t, but not so much By David H. Levy On May 30 observers all across the western hemisphere were outside, hoping to see a wonderful “new” meteor shower. The shower is actually not new. It is called the Tau Herculids, and it sends us dust particles from Comet Schwassmann-Wachman III. In 1995 this normally faint comet brightened dramatically as it split into several parts, releasing huge amounts of dust into space. On May 30, at 10 pm Mountain Standard time, the Earth plowed through the debris released in 1995. We were hoping for a possible meteor storm of hundreds of thousands of meteors. Wendee and I sat outside at Jarnac observatory, waited, watched, and waited some more. There was one bright meteor that seemed too far from the direction my camera was pointing for its lens to detect. Ten o’clock came and went, and we counted a few shooting stars here and there. Over the course of the evening we counted 18 meteors. But a meteor storm? To use the Yiddish word that means what you think it means, we saw bupkis. Somewhat disappointed, we went indoors and completed a quiet evening. […]
