How to watch the Geminid meteor shower 2024 live online tonight (December 13)

On December 14, 2024By Littum

2024 Geminid Meteor shower: online observation – December 13, 2024 – YouTube

The Geminid meteor shower peaks tonight (December 13), but if you’re unable to catch the prolific shower in person, you can still enjoy this spectacular event from home.

Astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project offers a free live stream of Geminid meteor shower on December 13, starting at 18:00 EST (2300 GMT) weather permitting.

You can watch all the action unfold here on Space.com courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project or directly on their WebTV page or YouTube channel.

Unfortunately, the bright near-full moon will wash out the fainter meteors, but we can still expect some impressive Geminids.

“While at its peak this shower features 100 meteors per hour under dark skies, this time we can probably expect 15 shooting star per hour,” according to Masi. “We will set up a special, very large field of view equipment in Manciano, under Italy’s darkest skies and will share the brightest meteors in real time!” Masi continued.

The night sky live

night sky graphic showing the milky way along the top of the circle with a pair of cartoon eyes in the center of the image. — (Image credit: Daisy Dobrijevic/Canva)

Keep up to date with what you can see tonight with our night sky live blog.

The Geminid meteor shower is famous for being one of the brightest and most reliable meteor showers of the year. From the Virtual Telescope Project live stream from Manciano Italy, the dark sky will give observers the best chance to catch a glimpse of impressive Gemini, regardless the bright moon.

Geminds are unusual because, unlike other meteor showers that result from debris left over from comets, they are created from pieces of a near-Earth object 3200 Phaethon, an asteroid that may have undergone a collision with another object in a distant past to create a stream of waste. The strange asteroid behaves like one comet and lanes the sun every 1.4 years. As Earth passes through the debris left by Phaethon, the “asteroid debris” is heated as it enters Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in bright bursts of light.

For more advice on how to photograph the Geminids, check out our guide to photographing meteors and meteor showers, and if you need imaging equipment, consider our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

Editor’s note: If you catch a great view of the Geminid meteor shower or any other night sky view that you’d like to share with Space.com for a possible story or gallery, send photos and comments to: [email protected].