Between Margot Robbie and Simon Baker, Canberra has been showered with stars lately – and now we will be showered with meteors.
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The annual Geminids meteor shower will rain fireballs across Australia from midnight on Monday, December 14 and Tuesday, December 15.
As the Earth ploughs through one of the densest debris fields in our orbit around the sun, southern skies will be lit up with shooting stars.
Australian National University astronomer Brad Tucker said the shower was a chaser to a "rogue" meteor that flashed across Canberra skies on Sunday evening.
"It was moving so fast you didn't see it in one single image; you had to combine it," Dr Tucker said.
"It was a really bright meteor. Meteors happen all of the time – in fact, there's a couple hundred tonnes of space debris that comes to the Earth every day – but occasionally you get some of these bright ones."
While a normal shooting star was the size of a grain of sand or a pebble, Dr Tucker said Sunday's meteor was a "good-sized rock".
"As a comet moves around the sun, it starts to melt and rocks start to fly off and leave a trail of debris so on [the Earth's] yearly path around the sun, we tend to run into old paths, so we'll never get ones as bright as one we got in Canberra a few nights ago, because that's kind of a big rogue space rock, a kind of baby Bruce Willis-style rock, where a meteor shower is a bunch of debris that we pass through," he said.
"It was a good appetiser for the show which is coming in a couple of weeks."
This should be an exceptional year to witness the parade of shooting stars, Dr Tucker said, provided the clouds remain at bay.
"With the Geminids, you can expect between 22 and 100 shooting stars per hour, so it's kind of a shower of rocks down on the earth," Dr Tucker said.
"Last year when the meteor shower occurred the moon kind of washed out some of them [but] this year it's a new moon, so the sky will be dark, which means you can see a lot more meteors and a lot more of the fainter meteors."
And the best part is you will not need a telescope to watch this particular astrological event unfold.
"You just need to be away from the city lights. The great thing about a meteor shower is that you don't need special equipment, you just need your eyes. You really need a dark area and a clear view to the east/north-east," Dr Tucker said.
