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Get ready: The Perseid meteor shower peaks on Thursday (August 12) and it has the potential to put on a good show.
Unlike 2020, when the meteor shower coincided with a quarter moon, this year’s peak will just happen four days after the new moon. This means that sky watchers will have dark skies under which to see up to 50 to 75 meteors per hour.
According to EarthSky Magazine, the best time to observe meteors will be early in the morning of August 11, 12 and 13, after the elevation of the constellation Perseus. If you’re more of a night owl than a morning dove, look skyward after 10 p.m. local time on one of those nights and you might be in luck. Although the most numerous meteors will cross the sky on August 12 between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. EDT (1900-2200 GMT), the meteor shower actually lasts from July 25 to August 18, and shooting stars are periodically visible throughout. this period. .
Related: The 7 strangest asteroids: Weird space rocks in our solar system
Know the Perseids
Perseids are caused by debris from the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which revolves around the sun every 130 years or so. Each July and August, the Earth orbits through the field of debris left by the planetary visitor. When chunks of ice, rock, and rubble hit the atmosphere, which they do at a speed of 37 miles per second (59 km / s), they burn. The Perseids are known to leave trails of light and color behind them as they zoom through the atmosphere, according to NASA. They also sometimes produce long, shiny fireballs, which occur when larger pieces of debris strike the friction of the atmosphere.
Most of the debris that creates Perseid meteors are the size of grains of sand, with fragments producing fireballs no bigger than a marbleamateur meteorologist and astronomer Joe Rao told Space.com. Thus, it is rare for the Perseids to produce a meteorite, or a fragment of space rock that actually lands on Earth.
The meteor shower takes its name from the constellation near which meteors seem to arise, Perseus.
Display tips for the Perseids
To observe the Perseids, find a dark place away from the city lights. Meteors are visible in the night sky (and are actually harder to see closer to their point of radiation), so don’t look directly at Perseus. Let your eyes adjust for 20 minutes for maximum visualization. The more you let your eyes get used to the dark, the more faint meteors you will catch. The moon will set around 10:30 p.m. local time on August 12, but if you’re trying to contemplate the sky while the moon is up, position yourself so that something like a building or a tree is in between. you and the moon so that its light does not interfere with your sight.
Get comfortable on a reclining lawn chair or picnic blanket. The hours of midnight to dawn are the most promising for viewing, due to the angle of meteors to Earth, but don’t rule out early and late evening either. Evening hours, according to EarthSky, may be the best time to see an Earth meteor, or a low, slow meteor that appears to meander over the horizon.
And that’s all. Telescopes and binoculars will only restrict your field of view, so the only equipment you need is a comfortable seat and maybe a hot drink.
“All you have to do is go out, find a nice dark place, lie on your back, and look up,” Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s weather environments bureau, told Live Science. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. in 2016. “You don’t want binoculars. You don’t want a telescope. You just use your eyes.”
Originally posted on Live Science
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