The mighty Perseid meteor shower is coming!
Set your calendars…Sunday, August 12th is going to be a beautiful night for shooting stars.
Every so often, Earth orbits through “dust clouds” that lie around the sun. When this happens, some of the “dust” gets sucked into Earth’s atmosphere and burns, giving us shooting stars. And there is one time of year when you can see this happen 40 or 50 times—sometimes even more.
I think astronomical phenomena are awesome, because they are a frontier that we have barely started scraping the surface of—and as yet we cannot engineer or control any of it.
We do know some things about why showers like these happen: Comets made up of ice and other materials revolve around the sun in highly irregular orbits. The sun’s energy burns them off, creating a brilliant glow (which is why comets can be so bright). However, sometimes some of the stuff that breaks off of comets simply hangs out in the solar system, and then Earth moves towards them and the effect of the atmosphere burns them again, creating shooting stars.
The comet known as Swift-Tuttle has left a dependable supply of comet dust in Earth’s path right at that point in our orbit in which our calendars read August 12. Of course, these shooting stars can happen before or after that date—but August 12 is going to be the best time to see them. In addition, the moon will be at its new stage, so there will be no glare. Hopefully I will have the presence of mind to take pictures.
Let’s just hope the weather is clear! Go to this website for more helpful info.
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[…] the sky rather than just one. This combined with the fact that I had just written a post about the Perseid meteor shower sparked my desire to do a post on really cool stuff in the sky. So here […]
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