James Brindle, age 13, of Belleville, Kansas for his question:

What is the zodiacal light?

In our latitudes, September and October are good months to look for the zodiacal light, It occurs in the eastern sky on clear, moonless mornings before dawn, when the night sky is darkest. The pale, ghostly glimmer is widest and brightest at the eastern horizon. From there it tapers up at an angle to a waning point high in the sky. This faint heavenly light can also be seen after sunset on clear, moonless nights in March and April. This spring showing, hoveverj is in the western sky. The widest and brightest area is then at the western horizon.

The zodiac, from which this heavenly glimmer gets its name, is a belt eight to ten degrees wide over the sky, In this path the sun, the moon and the planets rise, parade over the sky and set. Throughout the year, twelve constellations also parade around the zodiac. Most of these constellations are named for animals. Aries the Ram, Cancer the Crab, Leo the Lion, Pisces the Fishes are some of the constellations cr signs of the zodiac. The word zodiac is coined from old wcrds for circle and animals and is related to our word zoo.

In charting the stars, the astronomers regard the skies as the inside of a dome, called the celestial sphere, 'On a star map, the celestial equator is directly above the earth's equatcr, the celestial poles directly above the North and South Poles. Because the earth's axis is tilted, the apparent path of the sun throughout the year is also tilted. This path is called the ecliptic and is really an extension of the earth's orbit out into the celestial sphere. This is the region in which we see the zodiacal light.

Pale as it is, this zodiacal light shows up well in telescope pictures, It has also had its spectrum taken   the light it gives has been analyzed.

From this we know that the pale glimmer is reflected light, What we see is sunlight bouncing off countless trillions of meteors. It is estimated that such a light could come from a cloud of meteors, each one 25th part

of an inch in size and some five miles apart.  However, some of them may be bigger than this, say several feet wide, and some much smaller,

This cloud of meteors seems to form a lens shape around the sun's equator. It .reaches far out into space, even beyond the orbit of the earth. It is thickest, however, nearer the sun and most of the small heavenly bodies are crowded inside the earth's obit. At the equator, the zodiacal light is brighter and visible throughout the year. At times it stretches clear over the sky. Even in our latitudes we can rarely see a pale counterglow from the horizon opposite the zodiacal light,