Stargazers will get a bonanza come Thursday when Perseids meteor shower reaches its peak action.
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LAWTON, Okla._Grab your camera and chair, the annual August Perseid meteor shower is this week and the best viewing is supposed to be early Thursday morning.
The Perseid meteor shower happens as earth passes through a stream of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.
“The Perseids feature fast and bright meteors that frequently leave trains, and in 2015 there will be no moonlight to upstage the shower”, NASA said. Around 3 a.m. meteors could easily be seen every minute but most were too faint to show up in photographs.
“A meteor is a space rock – or meteoroid – that enters Earth’s atmosphere”, NASA says.
It seems like we’re in for a long and wonderful night.
But you’ll have to be eagle-eyed to spot the shooting stars as most last less than a second as they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Viewers should expect up to 100 meteors per hour to be visible from the dark sky. It’s expected that there will be 80 meteors per hour under clear skies so get ready for all night entertainment and grab the picnic blanket and some snacks. What makes this year’s event so tantalizing is that the moon is nearly new, meaning its glare will not interfere with the shower.
We should have pretty good viewing conditions tonight with a good bit of clear sky much of the night and temperatures in the 70s.
The Perseids are perhaps the best known and are among the most reliable showers in the meteor calendar and take their name from being in the constellation of Perseus.
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Most of these cometary particles are about the size of a grain of sand, but the force of their impact heats up the air around them enough to make streaks of light shoot across the sky. But the odds are considerably higher during a heavy meteor shower like the Perseids.
