Camelopardalid Meteor Shower to Grace the Sky on Friday: View the Celestial Event Live Online

A new meteor shower will amaze the sky watchers as the Camelopardalids will beautify the skies on the night of Friday, 23 May 2014.

It is expected that people at North America can get a glimpse of these meteors up in the sky. For those sky gazers for whom the meteor shower won't be visible, can watch it live online from two webcasts: Slooh.com and the Virtual Telescope.

The slooh webcast will focus on the comet that left the remnants, which resulted in meteor shower and will begin at 6 pm EDT (2200 GMT) or 3:30 am IST on Saturday, 24 May, while the live webcast of the shower from the Canary Islands will start at 11 pm EDT (0300 GMT) on Friday, 23 May or 8:30 am IST on Saturday, 24 May.

Gianluca Masi, astrophysicist of the Virtual Telescope Project in Ceccano, Italy, will host the Camelopardalid shower webcast on 24 May 2014 starting at 1:30 am EDT (0530 GMT) or 11:00 am IST.

The meteor shower will take place as the Earth passes through debris left by a rare comet 2009P/LINEAR. As the debris approaches our planet's atmosphere, it will burn up and form "shooting stars," which will stun the sky watchers. It can also be stated that these new meteors are remnants of Comet209P/LINEAR.

Most of the meteor showers are quite predictable, as it shows up around the same time every year, yet this is the first time that Earth will pass through debris left behind by the comet.

Comet 209P/LINEAR completes one orbit around the Sun every five years. It was only discovered in 2004 by the initiative of Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, which is carried out by the United States Air Force, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and NASA.

"The general consensus is that this week's Camelopardalids will be comparable to a very good Perseid meteor shower with an added possibility of a storm. I'm planning to be out watching." Washington Post quoted Geoff Chester, astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"The shower is really a mystery. Nobody can tell what's going to happen." San Jose Mercury News quoted Peter Jenniskens, a meteor expert at the SETI Institute in Mountain View.

Astronomers explained that Camelopardalids have the potential to grace the sky and produce great meteors every hour as bits of debris reach the Earth's atmosphere and burns up. For observers back on Earth, it is expected that they can see about 100 to 400 meteors per hour and the moonlight won't interfere the shower.

Photographers with a digital SLR camera can capture the grace of the shooting stars. Photographers can aim their SLR on a tripod to the northern sky, above Polaris, explained Naval Observatory's Chester, according to Washington Post.

The next meteor shower will be of the Perseids and Orionids, which will occur on the night of 12 August and 21 October respectively, according to StarDate.

Check out for the live webcast of meteor shower from Slooh Community Observatory

Check out the video promo of meteor shower from Virtual Telescope Project 2.0