Australian stargazers to enjoy two meteor showers this week – and you can leave the binoculars at home
The good news is that you won't need a telescope or a pair of binoculars to see the Southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids showers – just your own eyes.
Here's what you need to know about the meteor showers and where you can see them.
The southern hemisphere is likely to have a great view of both the meteor showers, with Australia in prime position to enjoy them.
But meteor showers are best seen away from the city lights, according to University of Southern Queensland professor of Astrophysics Jonti Horner.
He recommends stargazers scope out a potential viewing spot during the day – ideally somewhere away from buildings, street lamps and car headlights – to return to at night.
Stargazers should check the weather each evening too to decide which to venture out into – with some rain forecasted in Sydney on Wednesday and some cloud cover predicted in Melbourne and Brisbane this week.
The best time to view the showers will be between 11pm and dawn on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
'When the radiant rises you will start to see them but the higher the radiants get in the sky the better the view will be,' Horner said.
'So the radiant of the Southern Delta Aquariids, which is the stronger of the two showers, is highest at around 2.00am local time, which means any time between 11pm and dawn would be the prime time'.
He said that the radiant for the Alpha Capricornids is highest a couple of hours earlier just before midnight, but warned it may put on a less luminous show.
The Delta Aquaridds are coming in at about 40kms a second, while the Alpha Capricornids are travelling about 22kms a second.
Although some might be tempted to break out the binoculars or even the telescope to enjoy the meteor showers, Horner believes it's best just to use your own eyes.
'The reason for that is you'll want to have the widest possible field of view to be able to see the biggest amount of sky that you can, because the meteors that you see are bit of dust and debris hitting our atmosphere,' Horner said.
'If you're looking through binoculars or a telescope you've just got such small field of view that you won't see them.'
He also recommended not spending too much time looking at your phone screen beforehand so your eyes can adjust to the darkness faster – which allows you to spot the lights better.
'It takes about 45 minutes for your eyes to fully adapt to the darkness but you get most of your adaptation in the first 5 minutes,' Horner said.
Horner also suggested taking a chair or blanket with some pillows to lie down on to avoid a sore neck, while downloading an app that maps the night sky is a helpful way to know which way to look.
Horner said that you can visualise a meteor shower as being a stream of debris crossing the earth's orbit where all of the debris particles are travelling in the same direction.
'So that debris when it's coming towards the earth it will hit the earth from a specific direction' Horner said.
'The result that we observe is that the meteors can appear in any part of the night sky but they will always trace back to that point in the sky that is the direction the meteors are coming from'.
He said that the point where meteors are coming from is called the radiant of the meteor shower and so their names derive from the constellation that the radiant is in.
Horner said that the best meteor shower of the year for stargazers to look out for is the Geminid meteor shower which is active during the first couple of weeks of December but peaks on the nights of the 14-15.
'Depending on your latitude you'll be able to start observing those meteors in December from about 9.30pm in the Brisbane area, bit later the further south you go and a bit earlier the further north you go,' Horner said.
'That shower is by far the best shower of the year, the moon will be new this year so there will be nothing to interfere with your viewing'.
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It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.' The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. 'First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,' he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says. 'If you'd had a citizens' jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: 'Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation campaigns'? Of course not,' Kemp says. Escaping collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to rig the democratic system. 'I'd cap wealth at $10 million. That's far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk of destroying the entire planet?' If citizens' juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. 'It's always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That's because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,' he says. 'Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It's complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We're a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we're built for.' Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. 'There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,' he says. 'Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That's just making our economy more honest.' He also has a message for individuals: 'Collapse isn't just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don't be a dick. Don't work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don't accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.' Despite the possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects. 'I think it's unlikely,' he says. 'We're dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics. 'But even if you don't have hope, it doesn't really matter. This is about defiance. It's about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn't contribute to the problem.' Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp was published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin
