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The best meteor shower of the year is expected to peak Wednesday night through Thursday morning with blazing fireballs in the sky. Will the weather cooperate in the San Francisco Bay Area so you can see it?
While summer fog from San Francisco and some high-level clouds from a monsoon surge may obscure the Perseid meteor shower in some areas, National Weather Service forecaster Roger Gass said conditions of the cosmic show actually looked “pretty good”.
Fog cover over the San Francisco Bay Area was not as deep and extensive on Wednesday morning and Gass said similar conditions are likely Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.
“Most of the Bayshore line saw mostly clear conditions this morning,” he said. “Basically it was clear from Oakland to Palo Alto to Redwood City even to SFO. The clouds themselves were really confined only to the shoreline, a bit in the Golden Gate all the way to Berkeley and North. Bay, mostly confined to coastal areas. In the Sonoma Valley, all of Napa County, Contra Costa, up to Santa Clara, there were no clouds. “
The lack of fog is great news, but there is something else at stake. Monsoon moisture from the southwestern United States is expected to reach the Bay Area around 7pm on Wednesday evening, causing a high cloud dispersal in the morning.
“We’re definitely going to see clouds go by tonight, but I don’t think it will be to the point of completely obscuring the sky,” Gass said. “Most of the time you can see through the high clouds. It can limit some of the meteor shower, but you should still be able to see it.
A slight probability (less than 10%) of thunderstorms with dry lightning is also possible with the monsoon humidity, Gass said.
The annual Perseid meteor shower will peak early in the morning of Thursday, August 12, said Gerald McKeegan, assistant astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland. The best time to see the Perseids should be from 11 p.m. on August 11 to 3 a.m. on August 12.
“The Moon will set early on the evening of the 11th, so we’ll have dark skies and very good viewing conditions,” McKeegan wrote in an email. “Under ideal conditions, observers can see up to 100 meteors per hour.”
The Perseids light up the sky each year around mid-August when Earth passes through the cloud of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle, and the meteor shower appears to radiate from the constellation Perseus in the northeastern sky.
“As the comet revolves around the Sun, it leaves behind a trail of dust, grains of rock and pebbles that form a stream of particles orbiting the Sun,” McKeegan wrote. “As these particles enter and burn in Earth’s atmosphere, we experience a meteor shower.”
If you’re looking for the show, McKeegan said to forget about the binoculars or the telescope.
“Meteors are best seen with the naked eye when they pass through large parts of the sky,” he wrote. “Although the meteors appear to be coming from the east, from the constellation Perseus, meteors can appear in any part of the sky. So it is best to find a comfortable position from which you can see large parts. Lying on a blanket in a grassy field on top of a mountain would provide the optimal viewing opportunity. “
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