Perseids are worth losing sleep over
Early this month our Earth, in its orbit around the sun and traveling at better than 67,000 mph, is running into a dust debris trail left behind by a comet.
This cosmic trash is courtesy of Comet Swift-Tuttle that last visited our part of the solar system in 1992.
Comets are basically dirty snowballs that turn into litterbugs as they partially melt and leave behind trails of dust and debris no bigger than pebble size.
When the Earth runs into these trails we get a meteor shower as some of the debris gets gravitationally sucked into our atmosphere.
Air friction then goes to work and 99.9 percent of the debris gets toasted and burned up about 50 to 75 miles above the ground.
The meteor shower lighting up our Butler skies this week is one of the best of the year. It's the annual Perseid shower. Most would agree that it's certainly the most weather- friendly meteor shower.
You can stay out all night long under the stars and catch a great show, especially after midnight when you're on the side of the Earth that's heading into the Swift-Tuttle Comet debris.
Before midnight you're facing the other way in space, but after midnight our part of Earth will have rotated in the direction of Earth's orbit around the sun. It's just like taking a drive after dark in the countryside. You're going to get more dead bugs on your front windshield than you will on your rear window.
The very best morning this week for the Perseids will be this Friday morning from 1 a.m. to the start of morning twilight. That's when the Earth will be in the thickest part of the debris trail.
If possible, however, don't put all of your meteor watching eggs in one basket. It could easily be too cloudy or worse Friday morning.
Every morning this week the Perseids will be a part of our skies and with a little patience and the right strategy you may get to see at least a few of them.Some will be visible in the early mornings after Friday morning's peak as well.If you can, view the Perseid meteor shower away from city lights, from somewhere out in the boonies.Even in areas with limited dark skies you may see 50 meteors per hour, and maybe as many as 100 per hour.So if you have to view the Perseids in a moderately light-polluted sky, you should still be able to spot at least 10 to 20 meteors per hour if you do it right.The best way to watch the Perseids is to lie back on a blanket on the ground or a reclining lawn chair and roll your eyes all around the sky, slightly favoring the high northeastern sky.This meteor shower is called the Perseids because the meteors seem to emanate from the general direction of the constellation Perseus the Hero, which is in the high northeast sky in the predawn hours.You can pull up a sky chart on my website lynchandthestars.com or from free software like Stellarium to see exactly where to locate Perseus, but that's not all that important.Again, I advise you to roll your eyes all around the heavens, because if you restrict your gaze to just the area around Perseus you're bound to miss some meteors.They seem to come from Perseus but they travel throughout the celestial dome. The more people you have watching with you the more you'll collectively see.All you need are naked eyes (with eye glasses if necessary).Binoculars or a telescope are no good with meteor showers because they can only zero in on a very small area of the sky. You need to see the “big picture.”The dust particle to pebble size ammunition from this meteor shower incinerates over your head because of extreme air friction, but the light you're seeing is not because of combustion.
That makes perfect sense. How could a tiny little speck burning up that high produce such a bright light?The light produced as these meteors streak into our atmosphere at over 130,000 miles per second, way faster than a bullet out of a gun, is because of photochemical reactions.These particles are ripping through their respective columns of air so fast that the atoms and molecules in those columns are temporarily destabilized, producing the light that we see.Meteors can be all different colors, but the disrupted nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our atmosphere produce a lot of blue and green tinges in the quick streaks across the heavens.What's nice this year for the Perseids is that there won't be any moonlight white-washing the skies. The crescent to first quarter (half moon) sets before the best early morning Perseid pursuit beginsPray for clear skies this week and enjoy the Perseids. They're worth losing sleep over.Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net
