Incoming!!!

Perseid Meteor Shower Inbound

This time every year we get to enjoy the Perseid Meteor shower. It begins in late July and normally peaks around in the second week of August. This year the best viewing time is early in the morning of August 12th, and you’ll have to stay up to the wee hours (or get up early) to catch the peak of the shower during that time. Or, you can Perseid-gaze late at night, although you may not see quite as many as you would if you looked during the peak hours. Simply find a time when you can step outside around midnight and wait for a bright flash of light to flare through the sky from roughly the direction of the constellation Perseus. It appears very low above the eastern horizon, but you’ll likely spot meteors in many parts of the sky.

If you do see one (and chances are you’ll see more than one if you stay out any length of time), you’ll be witnessing a piece of solar system history flash across your field of view. It will be a tiny piece of debris left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle as it rounds the Sun. Comets date back to the earliest history of the solar system, so these debris pieces are at least 4.5 billion years old (if not older)!

Earth’s orbit takes our planet through that material about this time every year, and those little pieces of dust and grains of sand from the comet get swept up through our atmosphere. Most of them vaporize on the way down, and thus never reach the surface of our planet. These flares are called meteors; the tiny objects that cause them are called meteoroids.

So, dress warmly, prepare to stay up a little later than usual (or get up a couple of hours before dawn), and wait for the Perseids to send a few bits of solar system history across the sky for you to enjoy!

Want to know what else is up this month? Check out Our Night Sky over at AstroCast.TV—a quick tour I take each month through the highlights of stargazing.  This month we explore the planets, the Perseids, some familiar constellations and some deep-sky objects.

 

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