A Great Year to See the Perseid Meteor Shower

The annual Perseid meteor shower (the Perseids) occurs this year on the nights of August 10th-14th. The Perseids are often the best meteor shower of the year, with at least 10-30 meteors per hour visible even for beginning stargazers. The peak rates of meteors (also called shooting stars) will be seen on the nights of Wednesday, August 11th into Thursday, August 12th, and Thursday, August 12th into Friday, August 13th with as many as 50 meteors per hour or more visible in a clear, dark sky. The new moon (this year on August 9) creates a wonderful opportunity each night for perfect viewing, if the weather cooperates.

(click on image) The Perseid meteors become visible as the radiant (the path where the meteors seem to originate) rises. This graphic shows the sky on August 11-12, at midnight from the southwestern USA. Planets are not shown.

If monsoon clouds interfere, viewers will also be able to see meteors in numbers on the nights of August 10-11 and August 13-14. Meteor watchers should seek out a dark sky several miles away from city light and gaze in a wide area of sky high in the eastern and northern sky and overhead after 10:00 p.m. To see the shower well, observers should view until well after midnight (or in the hours before sunrise) in dark skies, far away from city lights. Good locations for viewing include the east end of Speedway at Saguaro National Park East and the Tucson mountains west of town. Observers should expect to drive 30 minutes to out of town, away from city lights, to get good views of the shower.

The debris causing the meteor shower is from a comet that passed Earth in 1992 named Comet Swift-Tuttle. The debris consists of tiny particles of rock, some thinner than a hair and most no larger than a grain of sand. Nearly all the particles of a meteor shower burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Comets are the source of nearly all meteor showers. Comets are bodies, often potato shaped and less than 6 miles in diameter, made of a loose aggregate of rock and ice that is in orbit around the Sun. As comets come in close to the Sun, they begin to evaporate off dust particles, gases and water vapor, leaving a long tail behind them. This tail leaves a trail of tiny debris in space, which Earth can pass through, resulting in a meteor shower.

To help the public learn about this meteor shower, the Mount Lemmon Sky Center will offer two special viewing nights on the summit of Mount Lemmon on August 11 and 12. Click here for more information (scroll down once at this Web link).