A Geminid meteor. Image credit: Jimmy Westlake via JPL

YAY! My second favorite meteor show of the year is coming up this week. The Perseids shower comes to us compliments of the Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The shower peaks on August 12 – 13, it’s a must see.

The shower seems to radiate from the constellation Perseus, which will be rising in the Northeastern Sky by 9 pm (your local time). I’ve heard predictions of up to 50 meteors per hour because the debris trail is especially favorable this year. PLUS!! The moon will be setting early on ensuring dark skies.

Don’t worry too much about being able to spot the constellation Perseus (here’s a little chart all the same), just look up. Several years ago I was coming home from a class learning how to start IV’s on poor Bram (he is now a college professor), anyway I was riding in the back seat of a hatchback at about 9:30 to 10 pm and had my head back so I was looking straight up out of the back of the car, I saw all kinds of meteors. So as long as you don’t have too many clouds (oh please-please-please no clouds for me), you will be able to see the bits of comet strike our atmosphere at 38 miles per second (61 km/sec). What actually happens is a little more complicated than what you might think:

This explanation from the US National Weather Service:

What we actually see “burning up” in our atmosphere is the air undergoing a compaction and compression ahead of the fast-moving meteoroid called incandescence. Compression is a heating process and the air ahead of a meteoroid glows brightly as the meteoroid moves quickly through our atmosphere, most of the time at speeds greater than 10 miles per second. This is why our spacecraft have to have heat shields upon re-entering our Earth’s atmosphere. Without the heat shields, the spacecraft would vaporize due to temperatures approaching several thousand degrees F.

If all goes really well I might try and get some images, that great one at the top of this post by Jimmy Westlake is on the JPL site: How to See the Best Meteor Showers of the Year: Tools, Tips and ‘Save the Dates’. Be sure to check it out!  BTW, they have a larger version of Mr. Westlake’s picture too.

My favorite shower? The Orinoids in October. Why? FIREBALLS!!

BTW Rob reminded me of this:

We have the opportunity to help out an effort to spatially analyze the Perseids meteor shower….No wait!

This is:
Easy
Costs nothing
Only requires a laptop and your eyes
It’s a fun geeky thing to do!

Check out the Perseid Project.

I’ll be participating clouds permitting.  (please-please-please no clouds!)