Things to See in the Night Sky Without a Telescope

The universe is full of wonders beyond our imagination. And while much of what’s out there in space can only be seen by powerful telescopes or theorized about by professional astronomers, there are many things you can see in the night sky just by walking out your door and looking up. The most common of these things is a meteor.

 

Head outside on any clear night, sit back in a comfortable chair with a warm beverage, and watch the light show up above. Chances are, if you stay out long enough, you will see a meteor streak across the sky. Also called shooting stars, meteors are objects falling through Earth’s atmosphere.

 

A meteor exists for only a brief moment; most are only visible for a few seconds. And, despite their occasional brilliance, most meteors are incredibly small. They are usually about the size of a grain of sand and rapidly burn up before hitting the ground. Meteors light up when they are about 40–50 miles above Earth. Meteors blaze because they are decelerating from tens of thousands of miles per hour to hundreds of miles per hour. That rapid deceleration transmits into heat and causes the air around the meteor to glow. Once the meteor is lower in the sky and has stopped this rapid deceleration, it stops shining.

 

Meteor showers occur at predictable dates each year when Earth slams into a swarm of space debris left behind by passing comets or asteroids. To maximize your meteor shower viewing experience, get out of the cities and away from lights. The darker the sky, the more meteors you will see. The best times to view meteor showers are generally between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. You can see some early shooting stars around midnight, but the later you stay up the better. The greatest showers, which occur once in a generation, are called meteor storms. You can see so many shooting stars pass overhead that you’ll think the sky is actually falling.

 

Really bright meteors are called fireballs. They glow white, blue, or green in the sky. Fireballs can break up into pieces and become multiple meteors streaking across the sky. Most fireballs were originally asteroid fragments. These irregularly shaped chunks of metal, rock, and dust circle our Sun mainly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some very small ones can come close to Earth and even run into us.

 

And that is what happened on February 15, 2013, when a huge meteor streaked across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. For a brief moment it shone brighter than the Sun and cast stark shadows. At first it didn’t make a sound, but about 2 minutes later a sonic boom shattered windows and even knocked people over. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second while the speed of sound is only 767 miles per hour. That difference in speed accounted for the lag time between seeing it and hearing it. If you see a bright fireball explode above the ground, stay away from windows. A sonic boom may strike a few minutes later and blow out the window in front of you. However, not a single person in the past 100 years has been struck and killed by a meteorite or falling space debris, so there is nothing to fear when you are conducting your meteor watch.