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When the most popular meteor show of the year climaxes next week, viewing conditions could be ideal unless Front Range visibility is hampered by smoke from distant forest fires.
The peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower will occur Wednesday night until the hours before dawn on Thursday, and most of the night the moon will not be visible, meaning the sky will be as dark. as possible. Last year, the peak of the Perseids occurred when the moon was half full. The year before it was 90% full.
The Perseid rain occurs each year when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by Comet 109P / Swift-Tuttle, which began on July 14 and ends on August 24. When the peak occurs, we could see 50 to 100 meteors per hour. They will burn in Earth’s atmosphere – or skim it off – at speeds equivalent to a trip from Denver to Colorado Springs in under 2 seconds.
Other meteor showers are heavier, sky watchers say, but in the northern hemisphere they occur during the colder months, when viewers may not be willing to bundle up, crouch down. and watch the nighttime show. The Perseids always occur in August.
According to a NASA educational site, the Perseids tend to be very fast and bright with long “wakes” of light and color. They are also known to produce fireballs, which are often meteors that explode in the atmosphere rather than just burn.
“Some people may call any glowing meteor a fireball, while others will use the term for meteors that appear to brighten dramatically and then disappear very quickly just at the end of the entry,” he said. said John Keller, director of the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explaining the definition of “fireball” is an ambiguous term. “This latter type of fireball is a case in which a larger object was heated by friction with the atmosphere, then exploded into many small pieces of rock which vaporized even faster, as the area to volume ratio increased dramatically. after one object becomes several thousand to several million smaller objects.
As for the comet that left all of this debris behind, Swift-Tuttle is currently more than 3.7 billion kilometers from Earth in an orbit around the sun that takes 133 years, and its most recent close approach has taken place. in 1992. Swift-Tuttle is 16 miles across, and several websites say it could end life on Earth if it hit the planet (but apparently we won’t have to worry about that until afterwards. year 4479).
Here are some tips for seeing the Perseids between sunset Wednesday and sunrise Thursday:
- During the evening hours, according to the American Meteor Society, the Perseid meteors will appear low in the northern sky. “This is the worst time to try to see the shower in numbers, as most of the activity will occur beyond your field of vision, being blocked by the horizon,” reports AMS. “But the few who come your way at this time of night are special. The reason is that they only scratch the surface of the upper regions of the atmosphere and will last much longer than the Perseids seen during the morning hours. Since they last longer, they will also travel a much longer distance in the sky. … Sometimes one of them will fly overhead and be unforgettable when you watch it cross the sky for several seconds.
- Around midnight, according to AMS, meteors will only last a few tenths of a second, but despite their shorter duration, their frequency is expected to increase as the night progresses. The best time to observe may be just before dawn when the area of the sky where the meteors are located is highest in the sky, usually around 4 a.m.
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