Even if you can’t make it to a park or another wide-open space like the beach, you should still be able to see some of the night’s meteors by heading up to a rooftop.
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Astronomers expect this shower, however, to feature 20 times the usual meteors seen per hour to at least 200 meteors an hour. According to NASA, this is going to be the first time since 2009 that the meteor shower rate will be double the normal.
“Forecasters are predicting a Perseid outburst this year with double normal rates on the night of August 11-12”, Bill Cooke from NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office said in a statement. Normally, the rate of Perseid Meteor Shower stands at 50 to 75 meteors per hour.
Stargazers will be looking up to the sky tonight, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Perseid meteor shower.
NASA says the best viewings will be between midnight and dawn.
The Perseid meteor shower occurs every August when the Earth moves through trails of debris left by an ancient comet called Swift-Tuttle.
Experts say they hit the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 134,000 miles per hour but don’t pose any danger to us on Earth. How much do you know about the celestial light show? “What happens is when the Earth goes through the long trail of its tail, we start to see the little particles from the tail come into our atmosphere”.
“In future years the moon phase may be better like it was last year when we had no moon at, that’s sort of the ideal circumstance”, he explained.
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In order to get the best view of the sky, try to stay away from buildings, trees, and city lights. The Perseids appear to radiate out from a point on the border of constellations Perseus and Cassiopeia. A major determining factor on where a good place is to watch the Perseids meteor shower is local cloud cover and artificial light pollution.
