Meteors shower Asia with delight

HONG KONG, China -- For those who stayed up late or woke up early to witness it, the annual Leonid meteor shower delighted thousands around the Asia-Pacific region as it tore across the sky with spectacular streaks of green, blue red and white.

At its peak at around 2:30 a.m. Hong Kong time (1830 GMT), meteors flew across the sky about every 10 seconds, with some lighting up the sky in the blink of an eye, others bursting into balls of fire.

The Leonid shower is named after the constellation of Leo, but is the result of the Earth plowing through a debris trail from the comet Tempel-Tuttle.

Although the comet passes the sun every 33 years, the dust particles seen this year were shed during a pass in the year 1766.

Tiny meteor fragments, often no bigger than sand grains, heat up as they speed and bounce across the upper atmosphere, producing intense flashes of light.

VIDEO Watch a part of the meteor shower (November 18) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

NASA dispatched a team of astronomers around the region to monitor the Leonid storm, from Hawaii to Guam and the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, where the clear dry air, thousands of miles away from any urban light source, would have given a spectacular show.

The celestial storm also had the potential to affect some satellites orbiting close to earth, so NASA scientists made sure space equipment stayed out of the path of moving meteor fragments.

Clear skies

In Beijing, a city famous for its industrial smog, suddenly cleared and the meteors easily outshone the bright city lights.

Clear skies and a vivid meteor shower also awarded South Koreans, where more than 1,000 stargazers sat in lawn chairs outside a youth training center 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Seoul, and saw a spectacular show of shooting stars.

Nearly 10,000 meteors were seen every hour at the peak of the shower at a checkpoint on Sobaek Mountain, 400 kilometers (250 miles) southeast of Seoul.

During a normal year, Earth encounters some 10-15 Leonid meteors an hour at best.

But many other people across the Asia-Pacific region who had dragged themselves out of bed for the celestial show were disappointed by bad weather. Skies in Tokyo and the nearby port city of Yokohama clouded over just after sunset, following a beautiful clear day.

And heavy clouds and rain throughout most of eastern and central Australia ruled out any chance of sighting the meteors with disappointed stargazers in Sydney and Canberra.

In remote Irian Jaya, in Indonesia, continuous rain also dampened hopes of getting any view at all of the spectacle.