Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight
The annual Perseid meteor shower, which began around July 14, will reach its peak activity early Wednesday morning. At its peak, the shower typically has anywhere from 60 to 80 visible meteors an hour, according to NASA.
NASA recommends viewers get away from city lights and lie flat on a blanket. When 
scouring the sky for meteors, avoid looking at the moon, since that will cut down one’s night vision and make it harder to spot the small streaks of light. Stargazers will have to contend with a gibbous moon that’s only a few days past being full.
The meteors can appear in any part of the sky, but the tails of the meteors will point back to the constellation Perseus — the shower’s namesake — in the northeast corner of the sky.
What is the Perseids?
The Perseids is the name of a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. The stream of debris is called the Perseid cloud and stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud consists of particles ejected by the comet as it travels on its 130-year orbit. Most of the dust in the cloud today is around a thousand years old. However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that was pulled off the comet in 1862. The rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than for the older part of the stream.
The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the earliest information on this meteor shower coming from the Far East. Some Catholics refer to the Perseids as the “tears of St. Lawrence”, since August 10 is the date of that saint’s martyrdom.
Posted by jacobW
on August 11 2009. Filed under uncategorized.
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