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Elizabeth
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| Posted: Aug 11 2006 at 6:39am | IP Logged
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MacBeth is not around and she would have posted this with a much more personal touch. Since I don't have that kind of encyclopedic knowledge of such things, here is a cut and paste of info on the shooting star show scheduled for this weekend  :
Sky & Telescope magazine predicts that the Perseid shower will reach its peak late on Friday and Saturday nights, August 11-12 and 12-13 (for viewers in North America). The rate of activity should pick up after midnight until the first light of dawn.
You'll need no equipment but your eyes. The moonlight in the sky will hide the fainter meteors, and so will artificial light pollution, but the brightest meteors should still show through.
Find a dark spot with a wide-open view of the sky. Bring a reclining lawn chair and a sleeping bag; the bag not only provides warmth against the late-night chill but also serves as mosquito armor in this era of West Nile virus. Cover your remaining exposed parts (including hair and clothing) with an effective mosquito repellent.
"Go out after about 11 or midnight or so, lie back, and gaze up at the stars," says Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert. "Relax, be patient, keep the Moon out of sight, and let your eyes adapt to the dark. With a little luck you'll see a 'shooting star' every few minutes on average."
Perseids can appear anywhere and everywhere in the sky. So the best direction to watch is wherever your sky is darkest. Faint Perseids appear as tiny, quick streaks. Occasional brighter ones may sail across the heavens for several seconds and leave a brief train of glowing smoke.
If you trace each meteor's direction of flight backward far enough across the sky, you'll find that this imaginary line crosses a spot in the constellation Perseus, near Cassiopeia. This is the shower's radiant, the perspective point from which all the Perseids would appear to come if you could see them approaching from the far distance. The radiant is low in the north-northeast before midnight and rises higher in the northeast during the early-morning hours.
Don't give up if it's cloudy on the peak nights. The shower lasts for about two weeks, with fairly good rates in the predawn hours of August 10 through 15. (The radiant is always low or below the horizon for Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; therefore few if any Perseids can ever be seen from these regions.)
The Perseid meteoroids are tiny, sand- to pea-size bits of rocky debris that were shed long ago by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This comet, like others, is slowly disintegrating as it orbits the Sun. Over the centuries, its crumbly remains have spread all along its 130-year orbit to form a sparse "river of rubble" hundreds of millions of miles long.
Earth's own path around the Sun carries us through this stream of particles every mid-August. The particles, or meteoroids, are traveling 37 miles per second with respect to Earth at the place where we encounter them. So when one of them strikes the upper atmosphere (about 80 miles up), it creates a quick, white-hot streak of superheated air.
For several years in the early 1990s the Perseids performed spectacularly, flaring with outbursts of up to hundreds of meteors visible per hour. The rubble streams responsible for these outbursts were probably shed during Comet Swift-Tuttle's swing by the Sun in 1862. In recent years, though, the shower has returned to normal.
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Elizabeth Foss is no longer a member of this forum. Discussions now reflect the current management & are not necessarily expressions of her book, *Real Learning*, her current work, or her philosophy. (posted by E. Foss, Jan 2011)
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marihalojen
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| Posted: Aug 11 2006 at 7:09am | IP Logged
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Elizabeth wrote:
| The shower lasts for about two weeks, with fairly good rates in the predawn hours of August 10 through 15. |
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I'm glad to hear that the show will last awhile longer. This full moon has been so bright! But it will be waning now, should let us see a bit more, hopefully!
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lapazfarm
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| Posted: Aug 11 2006 at 9:16am | IP Logged
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Argh! We have had no rain in a month and now we are totally clouded up for the next few days! Typical.
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MaryM
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| Posted: Aug 11 2006 at 9:36am | IP Logged
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We laid out last night, saw a few faint ones, and two very bright ones- our "Tears of St. Lawrence." Light pollution here is so bad though that we never get a very good show. Might head to the mountains one evening this weekend to try for a better view.
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Our Domestic Church
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mary
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| Posted: Aug 11 2006 at 2:19pm | IP Logged
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how cool! thanks for the tip.
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Molly Smith
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I saw one Saturday at about 4am despite the moon--it was awesome. It was a wonderful reminder of the vastness of God's creation and what a privilege it is to live in it.
Tonight seems much darker and since I can't sleep, I may just sneak outside on this cool, clear night and see if I can catch another one!
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Molly Smith in VA
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Molly Smith
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Success! I never made it outside, because when it comes right down to it, I'm a big chicken and we have lots of critters around here at night  , BUT, from my kitchen window I saw five (meteors, not critters!) in about 10 minutes. I could've stayed there all night, except for a sleepy little cuddlebug who came straggling out looking for me. From my bed, I can see a few stars clearly, but my view is just too low to catch any falling stars.
What an unbelievable night--I caught the last tiny bit of sun illuminating just the outline of the mountains to my west last night, witnessed meteors falling from the sky in the wee hours of the morning, and (thanks to a different little cuddlebug) caught the sun's first light over the mountains to the east a short time ago. Gotta love these skies...
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soodow
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| Posted: Aug 14 2006 at 9:23pm | IP Logged
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Saw a bright "shooting star" last night as I lay in bed about to fall asleep... I was surprised but being sleepy didn't think much about it until now!
Thanks Elizabeth!
Sue in NH
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aussieannie
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| Posted: Aug 14 2006 at 10:10pm | IP Logged
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Elizabeth wrote:
| (The radiant is always low or below the horizon for Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; therefore few if any Perseids can ever be seen from these regions.) |
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Yes, we discovered this...our eldest children had dinner on top of our roof and kept watch, but not much was to be seen...we did a bit of an internet search and that is what we read too..what a shame.
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4Real Forums : Exploring God's Creation in Nature and Science
Topic: Perseid Meteor shower
