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How do you mark a "shooting star"? Well, you do not look for eight legs; it's safe.
But a NASA camera designed to photograph meteors more spotted than she had predicted during the Perseid meteor shower, when a curious spider stopped. The photo was taken at Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter near Tucson, Arizona, August 5, 2019.
NASA runs a network of 17 all-sky cameras that capture black-and-white images of the entire sky with the help of a fish-eye lens. The cameras are designed to spot fireballs, which are meteors that enter the Earth's atmosphere with a brighter trail in the sky than Venus.
Related: Persian Meteor Shower 2019: When, where and how to see it
All-sky cameras regularly detect creatures a bit more earthly than meteors. NASA has already released photos of an insect, an owl and a small bird stopped by an open-air camera. And this recent spider visit is not the first time that NASA has attacked a photogenic spider: in 2007, a fleshy spider crawled in front of a camera ready to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
Another spider became famous in 2007 when she crawled in front of a camera that was preparing to film the launch of the Atlantis shuttle.
(Image credit: NASA)
The Perseid meteor shower is traditionally the best of the year, but this year, it's hard to distinguish the streakers from the rising moonlight. The Perseids culminate on August 12, while observers could see between 10 and 15 meteors per hour. The meteorite rain will continue until August 24th. Perseids occur when Earth searches the debris surrounding the Swift-Tuttle comet.
