I hope that was Natalie's idea! (who I think the Webb Space Telescope was really named after!)

Here are a couple of my genuine photos from the past few years. Five Geminid meteors in 40 minutes (from 5 photos overlayed onto each other), and my favourite Perseid meteor photo from a few summers ago!

As always, there are LOTS of fake photographs doing the round on social media at the moment, from AI generated content, to unrelated photos of star trails and photographs of satellites. (and yes, I am referring to the BBC there! How could you have guessed?!)

That dust is larger than most showers, resulting in bigger & brighter shooting stars that burn brightly for just a brief moment. The best time to see shooting stars is usually after midnight, when the Earth has rotated so that we are on the "front" of the Earth as it orbits around the solar system.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast is not looking good overnight this weekend, but if there is a gap in the cloud you may be able to see up to a shooting star every few minutes, as the Earth ploughs through dust left behind asteroid 3200 Phaethon.

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Nice one Dr Linn! 😀

Yikes. Many thanks for replying to my thinking out aloud - I learn something new every day!

Many thanks for replying to my thinking out aloud! The numbers are somewhere between interesting and worrying...

Ah, good point. I'd never thought of that before. Thanks for the wisdom!

That makes me wonder how many trees are needed to offset an average person's carbon emissions... a mature tree takes in ~20kg/yr, humans produce an average of ~5 tonnes per year, so ~200-250 mature trees are needed per person. There are ~twice that many trees on Earth, but most are not mature... 🤔