salutations celestial sight seers i'm david fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week the perseid meteor shower peaks on
august 12th at 1300 hours universal time so the perseids are
bits of gravel and dust and other things that comet swift
tuttle left behind as it has gone around the sun a number
of times and it crosses earth's orbital path
and as it does so it tends to leave those bits that the earth then plows
through around that same time every single year
so we call that the perseid meteor shower
now where do we actually go to see these well
pretty much anywhere up you don't need a telescope
you don't really need binoculars if you want to use them to see some of the
brighter smoke trails that are left behind you
can do that but mostly you really just need
your eyes and that's all that's required for
us to be able to see meteors and you want to see as much sky as possible
so ideally the best thing to do is get comfortable on either a lawn chair
or lay down on a blanket or any way that you can
lean back and look up at the sky and see as much of it as possible with as little
light pollution as you can as well because the darker that your sky
is the more meteors that you'll see now the
perseids produce up to 90 meteors per hour now that seems
like a lot but in reality you won't see that many
very often on a good year i might see as many as a dozen in an
hour and that just is because you can't look at the entire sky at once that's
okay just whatever direction that you're
looking try to capture as many as you can and try to look
towards the peak but the great thing about the perseids is
they tend to go from about a week or two beforehand
to about a week or two after with the majority of them occurring within a day
or two of that peak so we get a lot of opportunity to be able
to see those meteors
so ideally what you want to do is face that chair
or your body if you're laying down on the ground towards the north northeast
perseus will be rising over in the eastern part of the sky the northeastern
area but we don't need to look directly at
perseus what we want to do is look up and away from there so generally
overhead-ish or just whatever's comfortable for your neck you don't want
to be leaning back away like this because that can get uncomfortable on
your neck after a while but what you can do is just
look in that general direction kind of up and try to see as many as
you're able to capture so although that peak occurs
during the mid-afternoon hours for the united kingdom
and sometime in the early daylight morning hours for us here in
the united states what you can do to optimize your
opportunity to see as many of the perseids as possible
is try to look late at night and then towards midnight now the issue that
we're going to have is that a late waning
gibbous moon is going to wind up rising right about the time that would be the
ideal moment for us to be able to start
looking at the meteors which is after midnight so you may want to try for that
10 30 to midnight hour and a half window if you can
that may be the best opportunity for you to be able to see as many
meteors as possible with as little moonlight interfering as possible
and of course that's also during the middle of the work week so while many of
us may be working at home and have the opportunity to sleep in a
little bit longer it's still during the week so we don't want to stay up
all night necessarily unless you have no work the next day in which case stay up
all night see what you can see but for most of us
we're going to want to try to aim for that
that's all for this week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights
aimed down so we can all see what's up i'm david fuller wishing you clear
and dark skies