Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2020

SMALL BODIES 35 tic MAY-JUNE 2020 W hile waiting for someone to photo- graph a sub-relativistic meteor, we present a running series of the most spec- tacular images of ordinary meteors, cap- tured in the night skies of some famous astronomical observatories. Let’s start with this one, taken in 2015 at ESO La Silla, which shows a multitude of different objects, in- cluding Comet Lovejoy. [P. Horálek/ESO] M eteor showers are certainly one of the best-known phenomena in the night sky. It is difficult to imagine that there are people who, in their lifetime, have not seen at least one “falling star” (but, sadly, those people probably do exist). The tradition of “making a wish” when a meteor is seen