{"id":2041,"date":"2016-08-09T11:43:44","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T11:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/?p=2041"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:57:45","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T14:57:45","slug":"perseid-meteor-shower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/2016\/08\/09\/perseid-meteor-shower\/","title":{"rendered":"Perseid Meteor Shower"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Perseid<\/a>

A Perseid meteor. Image credit and copyright: Pete Lawrence<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Meteors, or shooting stars, are bright streaks of light originating from tiny grains of debris \u2014 often only the size of a grain of sand \u2014 whizzing through our atmosphere at speeds of tens of thousands of km per hour. Most of them originate from the trails of debris left by comets as they move around their orbits, and the Earth passes through the debris stream.<\/p>\n

In the case of the Perseid meteor shower that comet is Comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes close the the Earth and Sun every 133 years.\u00a0It\u00a0last made its closest approach\u00a0in 1992, and won’t be back in the neighbourhood until 2126, but the trail of cometary debris remains.<\/p>\n

Observing meteors is one of the parts of astronomy that requires the least equipment\u2014\u00a0possibly none. Of course, you have to wait until the sky has got dark, which at this time of year is 9-10pm.\u00a0Find somewhere with as little light pollution (street lights, house lights etc.) as possible, and with as wide a view of the sky as possible. Sit or lie back and just look up at the skies \u2014\u00a0don’t crane your neck as that gets uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Give your eyes 20 minutes to adapt to the dark for the best results, and take a blanket or extra layers, as the nights can still get chilly. Meteors will appear randomly, but once you’re dark adapted you should see a meteor at least every few minutes, depending on your conditions \u2014 a more light polluted sky will mean that you only see the brightest ones. There’s a more in-depth guide\u00a0on meteor observing from Paul Sutherland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While Perseid meteors can appear from late July until late August, they are more frequent in the middle of August, peaking on the nights of the 10th, 11th and 12th August. Meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, and there are also random, or “sporadic” meteors all year round, but if you trace their paths back, Perseids will appear to come from the constellation of Perseus (and typically appear longer the further away from the “radiant” they appear).<\/p>\n

The\u00a0view should get better\u00a0after midnight, as that’s when the part\u00a0of the Earth you’re on is turned into the path of the meteors \u2014 and this year that is about when the moon sets as well, so the skies should get darker still. The Perseids also feature in the\u00a0BBC Sky at Night summer starguide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just remember, that every time you see a shooting star, it’s probably a tiny grain of space-dust that has been happily orbiting the Sun for billions of years, possibly as part of a comet for much of that time,\u00a0but which no one took any notice of until the last split-second of its existence, as\u00a0it encountered the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The reason the Perseids are a particularly good shower is that the meteors are moving\u00a0very\u00a0fast relative to the Earth (about 58 km\/s, or 130,000 mph), and so are typically very bright.\u00a0The shower is also fairly consistent, thanks to the structure and location of the debris stream through which the Earth is passing.<\/p>\n

Some computer models suggest<\/a> that this year’s shower will be better than normal, with more meteors and possible a few fireballs (very bright meteors), but such models are fairly complex and have been wrong in the past<\/a>, so it will be interesting to see whether they’re right this year.<\/p>\n

If you’re really dedicated and would like to record meteors, then you can take long-exposure photos (maybe 30s to a few minutes) with a camera on a tripod, or you can record your visual observations, such as through the British Astronomical Association’s Meteor section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meteors, or shooting stars, are bright streaks of light originating from tiny grains of debris \u2014 often only the size of a grain of sand \u2014 whizzing through our atmosphere at speeds of tens of thousands of km per hour. Most of them originate from the trails of debris left by comets as they move<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":2051,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-astronomy-2","category-public"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hmOz-wV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/236\/2016\/08\/PeteLawrence_PersiedMeteor_2016_08_06_m_IMG_2754_cropped.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2299,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions\/2299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/physicsoutreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}