Brilliant Perseid meteor shower will send up to 100 shooting stars shooting across the night sky next week
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NASA calls it the “fireball champion” of the annual meteor shower, and it’s slated to take place next week under near-perfect conditions.
The Perseid meteor shower will illuminate the night sky from Saturday, August 12 into the wee hours of Sunday, August 13, with up to 100 meteors per hour.
And the cosmic show will be displayed between 10:30 PM and 4:30 AM for your local time zone.
The moon will be almost pitch black, giving off only the faint glow of its waning crescent phase, allowing the Perseid light show to brighten up the darkness all by itself.
According to astronomers, two of the absolute best places to see this year’s Perseid meteors are along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the United States.
The meteors are called Perseids because they seem to shoot out of Perseus, a constellation in the northern sky, itself named after the Greek mythological hero Perseus
Late Saturday evening, August 12, stargazers can enjoy a stunning meteor shower called the Perseids without needing a telescope. According to NASA, the Perseid event is “the greatest producer of fireballs among all meteor showers,” and it happens every year
The Perseid meteors come from debris streaming from the giant, 15-mile-wide comet 109/P Swift-Tuttle, which last passed Earth in 1992.
Every August, during Earth’s orbit around the sun, our planet passes through the debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle during its 133-year orbit around our solar system.
(Swift-Tuttle will fly past Earth again in the year 2126.)
Most other comets are much smaller, with nuclei only a few kilometers across Bill Cookethe head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.
“As a result, Comet Swift-Tuttle produces a large number of meteoroids, many large enough to produce fireballs.”
Cooke recommends catching the fireballs somewhere after dark, away from city lights or light pollution in general.
“While fireballs can be seen from urban areas,” Cooke said, “the much larger number of faint Perseids are only visible from rural areas.”
Perseid is also called “The Tears of St. Lawrence” because it happens every year near the feast of St. Lawrence on August 10.
This year, according to Cooke’s NASA team, the speed of Perseid meteors from a dark spot in a rural area could reach 100 “shooting stars” per hour.
As with past Perseid events, the meteor velocity will start out low but increase as the night progresses.
The meteor shower usually peaks just before sunrise — when the stars that are its namesake, the northern constellation Perseus, reach their highest point for the evening.
“Compared to last year when the moon was full, this year is going to be great,” Cooke said Business Insider this month.
The Perseid meteoroids, left in the way of Earth by Comet Swift-Tuttle, will blast through the atmosphere at 210,000 mph, or about 37 miles per second, igniting in brilliant flames due to the heat from their friction with the air.
“They are the largest producer of fireballs of all meteor showers,” said Cooke.
Known as the “Fiery Tears of Saint Lawrence,” the celestial event occurs as Earth plows through galactic debris left behind by the passing of the Swift-Tuttle Comet
Meteors, also called shooting stars, come from leftover comet particles and pieces of broken asteroids. The photo shows shooting stars from the Perseid meteor shower at night
However, the Perseid events pose no threat to human backyard skywatchers or anything else living below, as the objects almost always burn up in our atmosphere before reaching the planet’s surface.
Observers on the west coast of North America and the eastern Pacific will be particularly well placed to enjoy this year’s events, according to the British Royal Astronomical Society.
The society notes that, unlike many other astronomical events, meteor showers are best observed with the naked eye. No special equipment is needed to get the best view of these luminous celestial bodies.
If local cloud cover hinders your chances on August 12 itself, they report that the Perseids will continue through the following nights, though less brilliant once Earth leaves the Swift-Tuttle debris field.
The next big meteor shower this year is the Draconids in October, although it tends to be a less active shower than the Perseids.
The Draconid meteor shower originates from the debris of comet 21 P/ Giacobini-Zinner – a much smaller comet with a diameter of 2 kilometers.
The only shower similar to the Perseids, according to NASA’s Cooke, is the Geminid meteor shower.
Unfortunately, however, Geminid passes through the Earth in the middle of winter.
“The difference is that the Perseids occur on a nice, warm summer night,” Cooke said. “The Geminis are in mid-December and you’re freezing your tail off.”
Cooke recommends that “if you’re going to watch a meteor shower this year,” this month’s Perseids are “the ones to see.”
“Just lie back with your eyes and take in the sky,” Cooke said. “You’ll see and fly with Perseids.”