During the shower, the meteors emanate from the part of the sky that contains that constellation.
Advertisement
Sky watchers all over the world look forward to August as the time of the Perseid meteor shower.
“Forecasters are predicting a Perseid outburst this year with double normal rates on the night of August 11-12”, said Bill Cooke with NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office in Huntsville, Alabama.
If the predictions by Maslov and Lyytinencometary hold, onlookers could witness as many as 100 meteors per hour. This “radiant” is in the constellation for which the shower is named. When these particles hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they burn up and we see the white glowing streaks in the night sky. A location with a full view of the sky, that’s away from light pollution, will be best. The Perseids are dust bits from Comet Swift-Tuttle and are famous for creating bright fireballs and elevated meteor activity for almost two weeks in mid-August.
Advertisement
A meteor shower occurs when a large number of meteors appear to radiate from a point in the sky. Indeed, the Perseids are all that’s left of the eons-old rocky space projectile, which is now nothing more than an icy, rocky plane of space debris that orbits around our collective star every 133 years or so. Earth is expected to pass through the middle of the stream, where there is much more debris to be found than on an edge fly-by. It’s because the Earth will collide with material coming from the ancient Comet Swift-Tuttle. Known for its fast and bright meteors, the annual Perseid meteor shower could be one of the best potential meteor viewing opportunities this year. NASA recommends going outside between midnight and dawn on Friday morning. “You’ll be able to see”. Keep in mind, your human eyes aren’t trained to see in the post-midnight darkness, and you can expect it to take around three-quarters of an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to the darkness that makes the Perseid meteor shower so epically lovely.
