💫☄️Tips for the Perseid Meteor Shower! 💫☄️ (Patreon)

The Perseid Meteor Shower is this week! It can be seen from all over the world, but the Northern Hemisphere may see more of them! Have you seen this meteor shower before? Here’s an article with some more information and tips for the best viewing of this magical show! Remember to charge your crystals and tools if you choose and make wishing star water! ✨

Though there are over 30 meteor showers annually, none are as anticipated as the Perseids, the biggest and most spectacular of them all. The "shooting stars" have been streaking across the skies at a rate of about a dozen an hour, since mid-July. However, the meteors' pace will sharply escalate over the next few weeks, reaching a high of between fifty to a hundred an hour, on August 11, 12, and 13, 2023.

Though often referred to as shooting or falling stars, meteors have nothing to do with stars. Rather, they are remains of cosmic dust and dirt left behind by comets traveling through the area. When the debris collides with the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds, it burns, resulting in a flash that resembles shiny stars streaking through the skies, or what we call meteors.

The Perseids get their name from the constellation Perseus, from which they appear to spurt. They are, however, composed of the dust and rocks left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet as it passes by Earth during its 133 year-long orbit. Though the comet will not come by again until 2126, it has left behind plenty of fragments from its last visit in 1992. The meteor shower's consistently impressive yearly performance can be attributed to the fact that our planet always passes close to the center of the debris stream, where the dust is the most dense. Though visible worldwide, due to Swift-Tuttle's orbital pattern, the best views are reserved for Northern Hemisphere residents.

In addition to being the most reliable of all meteor showers, the Perseids also produce the highest number of fireballs — meteors as bright as Jupiter and Venus. NASA scientists, who have nicknamed the Perseids "fireball champions,” believe that the shiny meteors are a result of Swift-Tuttle's large, 26 km wide nucleus. They speculate that it leaves behind hundreds of meteoroids, many of which are large enough to produce fireballs. So be sure to mark your calendars and see if you can catch one or two of the impressive shooting stars. And don’t forget to make a wish. It is bound to come true.

Here are a few tips to help you enjoy this shower.

1. No special equipment, or knowledge of the constellations, needed.

2. Find a wide-open sky. These meteors will all come from a single point in the sky, their radiant point. More about that below. But, as you stand watching (and depending on what time of the night it is), you’ll see meteors streak across the sky in front of numerous constellations. A wide-open sky will give you the best show.

3. Watch from midnight to dawn. That’s when the part of Earth you’re standing on will be heading into the meteor stream in space. So you’ll see more meteors. By dawn, they’ll be raining down from overhead. Be aware that the Perseid meteors will start to fly in mid-to-late evening from northerly latitudes. South of the equator, the Perseids start to streak the sky around midnight. Here’s an added bonus for evening observing. If fortune smiles upon you, the evening hours might offer you an earthgrazer, a looooong, slow, colorful meteor traveling horizontally across the evening sky. Earthgrazer meteors are rare but memorable. Perseid earthgrazers appear before midnight, when the radiant point of the shower is close to the horizon.

4. You want a dark sky for watching meteors. In a dark sky, you may see up to 60 meteors per hour at the shower’s peak. Will you see over 100 per hour, as in some years? Perhaps. But you won’t know unless you look.

5. Give yourself at least an hour of observing time, because the meteors in meteor showers come in spurts and are interspersed with lulls. Remember, your eyes can take as long as 20 minutes to adapt to the darkness of night. So don’t rush the process.

6. Enjoy the comfort of a reclining lawn chair. Bring along some other things you might enjoy also, like a thermos filled with a hot drink.

7. If you must watch in moonlight, place yourself in the moon’s shadow. If the moon affects your viewing, place some large structure or natural object – a barn, a cabin, a mountain – between you and the moon. You’ll see more meteors that way than if you’re standing out under the blazing moonlight itself.

8. Consider watching after the peak. People tend to focus on the peak mornings of meteor showers, and that’s entirely appropriate. But meteors in annual showers – which come from streams of debris left behind in space by comets – typically last weeks, not days. Perseid meteors usually start streaking the sky around July 17. They rise gradually to a peak, then fall off more rapidly. Still, we’ll see some Perseids – though at considerably reduced numbers – for some days after the peak mornings on August 11, 12 and 13.

9. Remember, all good things come to those who wait. Meteors are part of nature. There’s no way to predict exactly how many you’ll see on any given night. Find a good spot, watch, wait. You’ll see some.

10. Also remember, as the Perseids are rising to their peak, the Delta Aquariid meteor shower will still be rambling along steadily. You’ll see mostly Perseids, but also some Delta Aquariids in the mix.

Perseid meteor shower radiant point

If you trace all the Perseid meteors backward, they all seem to come from the constellation Perseus, near the famous Double Cluster. Hence, the meteor shower is named in honor of the constellation Perseus the Hero.

However, this is a chance alignment of the meteor shower radiant with the constellation Perseus. The stars in Perseus are light-years distant while these meteors burn up about 60 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface. If any meteor survives its fiery plunge to hit the ground intact, the remaining portion is called a meteorite. Few – if any – meteors in meteor showers become meteorites, however, because of the flimsy nature of comet debris. Most meteorites are the remains of asteroids.

In ancient Greek star lore, Perseus is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal Danaë. It is said that the Perseid shower commemorates the time when Zeus visited Danaë, the mother of Perseus, in a shower of gold.

Comet Swift-Tuttle and the Perseids

Every year, from around July 17 to August 24, our planet Earth crosses the orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle, the parent of the Perseid meteor shower. Debris from this comet litters the comet’s orbit, but we don’t really get into the thick of the comet rubble until after the first week of August. The bits and pieces from Comet Swift-Tuttle slam into the Earth’s upper atmosphere at some 130,000 miles (210,000 km) per hour, lighting up the nighttime with fast-moving Perseid meteors.

If our planet happens to pass through an unusually dense clump of meteoroids – comet rubble – we’ll see an elevated number of meteors. We can always hope!

Comet Swift-Tuttle has a very eccentric – oblong – orbit that takes this comet outside the orbit of Pluto when farthest from the sun, and inside the Earth’s orbit when closest to the sun. It orbits the sun in a period of about 133 years. Every time this comet passes through the inner solar system, the sun warms and softens up the ices in the comet, causing it to release fresh cometary material into its orbital stream.

Comet Swift-Tuttle last reached perihelion – closest point to the sun – in December 1992 and will do so next in July 2126.

Source:

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-perseid-meteor-shower/