Make a Wish

I saw Halleys comet a few years ago from Naval Hill in Bloemfontein. I think I watched it with Tammy Flint.

So this is interesting. Between Tuesday and Friday next week the Earth will move through the debris path of an interesting comet called the Tempel-Tuttle comet. This comet swings around once every 33 years. The last time it was in our neighborhood was in 1998, and each year after that the show is less spectacular than the last. If the moon is in the sky, as it was in 2002, you only see the very bightest meteors. This year is likely to be much better, but the quality of the actual shower is likely to be somewhat diminished.

When the Earth swings through the part of space we are in now, usually around the middle of November, we hit trails of TT's space dust. Scientists call the meteors that 'come out' of the constellation Leo Leonids. Leonids are the streaks of light that are really rock and ice (in this case from Tempel-Tuttle), incinerating high above us as they tear into our protective atmosphere at superspeed.

The meteors will sparkle from the "Sickle" of Leo, but the best way to watch out for them is just to keep looking all over the sky for any bright lights.
Leo only comes into view fully after midnight so that's the best time to be looking at the heavens.

Some of the best conditions for people watching the sky could be in the early morning of November 20 over Europe, Asia and Australia.

What makes this meteor shower amazing is the brightness of the meteors likely to be seen. Not only that, the earth will pass through some trails of dust left hanging in space in 1333. Another curtain of dust, one left by a 1733 flyby, may produce 30 to 60 Leonids in an hour. These various debris paths vary in the amount of material in them, and it will take a few days to move through all of them. The speed at which these meteors scream across the sky is barely imaginable. They are whizzing through space in the opposite direction to Earth (and Earth is moving at 29.7km/s) which cause us to see the fastest head on collisions, the fastest meteor speeds possible: 72 kilometers per second. Think about that for a second. Now imagine you are 72km away! Now make a wish.

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/041112_leonid_meteors.html