Each can look at a different part of the sky and make a game out of it as to how many you see.īinoculars and telescopes are NOT needed just your eyes! Some like to take time exposure pictures and let the stars trail on the image, and hopefully catch a meteor crossing over. A vacuum bottle of hot drink and maybe a snack will help!Įnjoying meteors with a loved one or friend is an extra blessing. For optimum comfort, dress extra warm, and settle in a reclining lawn chair. The longer you look the more you may see. Trace its path backward if it points to the radiant, it is likely a Perseid.įind an area with as much open sky as possible, away from street lights, etc. Not every meteor you see is necessarily a Perseid. The meteors, however, can be seen anywhere in the sky close to the radiant they will be short further away they are long and more spectacular. in the northeastern sky, where the radiant is found. Still, you can expect to see some in late evening. For that reason, meteor showers are most visible between midnight and morning twilight. That means you are on the side where our world literally plows into the cascade of meteors. You never know.Īfter midnight you are on the side of the Earth facing towards where the Earth is moving in its orbit. You might wait 10 minutes and see none at all then see one, two or three quick succession. 11 the moonlight will obscure the fainter meteors. This year, however, Last Quarter Moon is on Aug. 11 and 12, but they are visible at lesser rates for about a week before and a week after.Īt the peak, under excellent conditions you might see 50 to 80 an hour. The peak of the shower is Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Aug.
This star pattern is just below the familiar W-shaped Cassiopeia constellation. The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus hence its name. There are showers that are even more intense, but occur when it is too cold out for many! This is a most popular meteor shower in the Northern Hemisphere since it is both strong and visible during the warmer months. Its debris is scattered all around its orbit. It was last passing through the inner solar system in 1992. The Perseid shower is the debris of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which loops around the Sun every 133 years. The vast majority plunge into oceans undetected. A piece we call a meteorite may make it to the ground. The debris vaporizes high in the Earth’s atmosphere, giving off the light we see, and sometimes backed by a momentary trail.Ī few rare chunks of asteroid get swept up by the Earth every day, and are so bright we call them fireballs. Each year the Earth passes through the long, looping orbits of comets, plowing into the stream of left-over dust particles. Most of it comes from disintegrating comets some are bits of asteroid debris. The Perseid shower, like all meteors showers, actually “rains down” the very smallest of rock, on the order of grains of sand. We know that cannot be true for after all these thousands of years of seeing what must be trillions of meteors in that time, the sky would have run out of visible stars! Indeed, the sudden sight of one streaking across a clear night sky may almost seem like one of the stars, seemingly forever in place, has just come loose and is shooting downward only to fizzle out. I could have said “shooting stars,” which is a very old phrase referring to meteors. It’s time for the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, certainly the best known, best loved and one of the best showers of “falling rocks” to be regularly seen. When the meteor broke up the pressure wave produced was recorded on seismometers and infrasound instruments.Ĭooke said what makes the incident unique is the sky was very cloudy and there are not as many eyewitness reports of the actual fireball as there are of the loud boom.Ĭooke said it is possible the incident produced meteorites across the region.Columns share an author’s personal perspective It is believed the meteor had an energy between one and two tons of dynamite and could have been anywhere between 50 to 100 pounds traveling at a typical speed of 45,000 miles per hour.
NIGHT OF THE METEOR GAME FULL
last Friday over New Market, Virginia near the border with West Virginia and the Hardy County community of Mathias.Ī boom sound was reported across the region.Īccording to Cooke, the fireball shows up on Geostationary Lightning Mapper data with the meteor that caused it having the same possible brightness as a full moon. William Cooke, lead with the NASA Meteoroid Environments Office, said the reported fireball happened at about 10:30 a.m. Meteorite hunters will be combing through parts of the Potomac Highlands after a fireball was reported over parts of eastern West Virginia and northern Virginia last week.
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