With a new moon coming Friday, the next two nights should offer a dark background for spectacular meteor viewing, assuming the clouds stay away.
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NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will host a live Ustream broadcast about the Perseid meteor shower on Wednesday, August 12.
The sky show is pieces of Comet Swift-Tuttle hitting Earth’s atmosphere at more than 133,000 miles per hour and burning up.
The best times to catch it will be overnight Wednesday Aug. 12 into Thursday Aug. 13, with the peak in the predawn hours, around 4 a.m., Thursday.
The good news is that unlike other astronomical phenomena, you don’t need any special equipment to view tonight’s meteor shower.
Starting at around 11 pm, you’ll be able to see as many as 50 of these meteors per hour. “You want a view of the whole sky”.
The Slooh spokesman added: “The effect is similar to falling snowflakes that seem to radiate from a point in front of your windshield as you drive into a snowstorm”. When Earth passes through the debris floating in space our atmosphere causes the debris to burn up leaving a bright tail in the sky. The major meteor shower will be visible all over the Northern Hemisphere.
It isn’t really necessary to find the radiant though to see the meteor shower, McGuire said.
The best time to watch the meteor shower will be from 11pm tonight through to dawn tomorrow morning.
A moonless evening could give stargazers a fantastic light show.
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Although meteor showers are not huge events for professional astronomers, they are a great way to inspire people to learn about astronomy, experts say. As Swift-Tuttle nears the sun, the extreme heat vaporizes ice particles on the comet and bits of debris break off, leaving a trail of dust in the comet’s wake.
