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KXO News Education Center Summer Meteor Showers August 12th and September 1st
KXO News Education Center Summer Meteor Showers August 12th and September 1st Todays is : Tuesday, 02 December 2008
| Summer Meteor Showers August 12th and September 1st |
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| Written by Jim Christopherson | |
| Tuesday, 28 August 2007 | |
 If you wish to observe meteors in the night sky, mark your calendar for Sunday night August 12th and for Saturday just before dawn on September the first.Of the 43 or so known yearly meteor showers, the Perseid meteor shower is one of the most famous and dependable. The peak of this five-night event with 60 to 90 meteors per hour is on a moonless Sunday night August 12th. The number of meteors per hour should increase from midnight through dawn on Monday. The Perseid meteors should race by at an altitude of over 60 miles above the ground and come from the northeast (which means for us they will be coming from the direction of Blythe). The Perseid meteors should streak in overhead and vanish in seconds. The next best years for the Perseid meteors will be in 2010 and 2013, when again there will be no bright moon.
To watch for meteors, try to find a dark location where you can see as much of the sky as possible. It's best if you can look straight up, so lying on a blanket helps. The secret to watching meteor showers is that you want to continue to keep looking up, because as soon as you look away you will miss a fast streaking meteor. You must be very patient. I have often looked up and seen nothing for 15 minutes. Some of the Perseid meteors are very bright with long trails, while others appear as just a dim momentary fuzz. Again if you are very patient, you should be rewarded as a bright Perseid fireball streaks by overhead.
The next meteor shower, the Aurigid shower, will be mainly visible just before dawn and only here on the west coast and in Hawaii. This is a very concentrated meteor shower with a predicted peak on Saturday morning September first at 4:37 am PDT. These meteors also will stream in from the northeast and the Aurigids are most noted for their long yellow trails. The long period comet Kiess, that swept by in 82 BC, and again in 1911, left a stream of debris that the earth passes through each year and causes the Aurigid meteors. Unfortunately this year the moon will be up, so the sky will not be quite dark. There are some predictions that this year, at the peak of the shower (between 4 and 5 am PDT), there could be a burst of Aurigid meteors. |
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