This weekend is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, one of the most famous and largest celestial events visible from Earth.
The meteors have been visible to observers for the past few days and will get an even better view during the event’s peak on Friday night.
“Meteors are these little bits of space dust that hit the ground and burn up, and when that happens, we see them in the sky as a shooting star or shooting star,” says Scott Young, an astronomer at the Manitoba Museum Planetarium. “Meteor is kind of the official name for these objects and every night you can probably see one or two of them if you’re lucky, but on certain nights of the year the Earth passes through a big cloud of space dust and when all that dust hits the Earth in one and same night, you get a lot of meteors. So we call this a meteor shower.”
Young also says it won’t look like thousands of stars are falling from the sky, but rather one star every minute instead of one per night.
“It always happens every year around August 11-13, somewhere in that range, because we pass through the dust bunny left by a comet crossing Earth’s orbit. Now, that doesn’t always mean you’re going to see all of these things hitting the Earth, and the weather can happen during the day for you. It could be cloudy or like this year, near a full moon. When the full moon is up, it makes it harder to see some of these fainter meteors that you’re going to see.”
The best time to see any meteor shower is between midnight and dawn. According to Young, even with the bright light of a full moon on the same night as peak meteor viewing, it’s a heavy enough shower that viewers will still be able to see shooting stars.
“The official peak is after midnight Friday night, so Saturday morning around 3:00am our time. But honestly, it’s not an overnight event. It builds up over the previous few weeks and every night there will be more and more meteor showers until the peak and then, after the peak, it goes away for a few weeks.”
The comet that caused the meteor shower was Comet Swift-Tuttle, discovered by Louis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle in 1862.
“Each meteor shower during the year has its own source objects, most of them are comets, and we know that when we get close to the comet’s orbit in our orbit, we will see this meteor shower. They are actually named after the constellations in the sky where the meteors appear to come from. When looking at the sky, it looks like the meteors from the Perseid meteor shower will come from the constellation Perseus, which rises in the northeastern part of the sky at this time of year. That doesn’t mean you have to know where Perseus is, meteors can appear all over the sky.”
To get the best view of the peak of the meteor shower, Young suggests viewers go to a place where there aren’t many lights and even “turn your back to any bright lights that are like the moon or city lights.” He also suggests putting your phone away because the bright light will cause your eyes to need time to adjust to the dark sky and some of the fainter shooting stars may be missed.
“It’s one of those things where you have to turn off the ignition, turn it off and just lie under the stars and relax and look up. It’s a great therapeutic way to connect with heaven.”
Typically on the peak day of the event, Young will go out with an all-sky camera and broadcast live on the Manitoba Museum’s Facebook and YouTube pages, but he says it always depends on the weather.
Young says popular places to view celestial events include Birds Hill Park and Oak Hammock Marsh, but because of the accessibility of the meteor shower, observers can go either way.
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