Less than a month after the Leonid meteor shower, another excellent display is just around the corner. The reliable, annual Geminid meteor shower is scheduled to reach its peak during the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, Dec. 14.

The Geminids should produce a fine display of 1-2 meteor every minute for North American observers with dark skies, weather permitting. Brief bursts of activity could produce even higher rates. The nights and mornings surrounding the peak activity should prove rewarding, too.

In other parts of the world, such as Europe, Asia and Australia, the Geminid peak will come during local daylight hours. Still, observers in these parts of the world should still see a very good meteor display on the night of Dec. 13-14, with rates of about one meteor per minute likely.

The Geminid display is for those willing to brave the chill of a December night a fine winter shower, and usually the most satisfying of all the annual showers, even surpassing the more widely recognized Perseids of August. Studies show that the Geminids are rich in slow, bright, graceful meteors and bright fireballs, as well as faint meteors, with relatively fewer objects of medium brightness.

Many Geminids appear yellowish in hue. Some even seem to form jagged or divided paths.

According to meteor specialist Neil Bone, at 2 grams per cubic centimeter on average, Geminid meteoroids are several times denser than the cometary dust flakes that supply most meteor showers, so they burn up less quickly. Add this to the relatively slow speed with which Geminids typically encounter Earth 22 miles per second (35 kilometers per second), or roughly half the speed of a Leonid meteor and you have the recipe for meteors that linger a bit longer in view than most.

The Earth moves quickly through this meteor stream producing a somewhat broad, lopsided activity profile. Rates increase steadily for two or three days before maximum, reaching roughly above a quarter of its peak strength, then drop off more sharply afterward. Late Geminids, however, tend to be especially bright.

Renegade forerunners and late stragglers might be seen for a week or more before and after maximum.

The Geminids perform excellently in any year, so observers can rely on a fine display. There will be some moonlight to combat, but it will not spoil the event as it can be easily avoided.

The Moon will reach First Quarter phase on Dec. 11, and two nights later, for the peak of the Geminids, it will be in the waxing gibbous phase, shining brightly in the dim constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. Many of the fainter Geminid streaks will likely be washed out by moonlight.

But unlike last months Leonids, where a nearly Full Moon illuminated the sky all night, the Moon will set soon after 2 a.m. local time early on Saturday, Dec. 14. That means that the sky will be dark and moonless for the balance of the morning, making for perfect viewing conditions for the shower.

Peak activity is projected to fortuitously occur at or near 4 a.m. EST (1 a.m. PST) on Dec. 14. Under normal conditions on the night of maximum activity, with ideal dark-sky conditions, at least 60 to 120 Geminid meteors can be expected to burst across the sky every hour on the average. Rates could even briefly climb higher for North American viewers.

Local light pollution, from city lights to backyard lighting, greatly cuts the numbers that are visible to a given observer, leaving only the brightest meteors visible. Under such conditions, an observer might expect no more than one meteor every two or three minutes, on average.

A productive Geminid watch can actually begin as early as 10 p.m. local time, because the showers radiant is already fairly high in the eastern sky by then. Even with that annoyingly bright Moon still high in the western sky, it will be worth watching for some early "Gems," as astronomers sometimes call them.

But keep this in mind: at this time of year, meteor watching can be a long, cold business. You wait and you wait for meteors to appear. When they don't appear right away, and if you're cold and uncomfortable, you're not going to be looking for meteors for very long!

Therefore, make sure you're warm and comfortable. Warm cocoa or coffee can take the edge off the chill, as well as provide a slight stimulus. It's even better if you can observe with friends. That way, you can keep each other awake, as well as cover more sky.

Give your eyes time to adapt to the dark before starting.

The Geminids will be especially noticeable right after the Moon sets, as their radiant point will be passing very nearly overhead. The higher a showers radiant, the more meteors it produces all over the sky.

The track of each one does not necessarily begin near Castor, nor even in the constellation Gemini, but it always turns out that the path of a Geminid extended backward along the direction of flight passes through a tiny region of sky about 0.2 in diameter (an effect of perspective). In apparent size, thats less than half the width of the Moon. As such, this is a rather sharply defined radiant, as meteor showers go, suggesting the stream of space debris that fuels this shower is relatively young, perhaps only several thousand years old.

Geminids stand apart from the other meteor showers in that they seem to have been spawned not by a comet, but by 3200 Phaeton, an asteroid that crosses the path of Earths orbit. Then again, the Geminids may be comet debris after all, for some astronomers consider Phaeton to really be the dead nucleus of a burned-out comet that somehow got trapped into an unusually tight orbit around the Sun.