Perseid Meteors to Peak August 11–13, 2005 (Forwarded)

Sky & Telescope
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Contact:
Alan MacRobert, Senior Editor
617-864-7360 x151

Marcy McCreary, VP Mktg. & Business Dev.
617-864-7360 x143

Press Release: August 4, 2005

Note to Editors/Producers: This release is accompanied by
publication-quality illustrations and broadcast-quality animations; see
details below.

Perseid Meteors to Peak August 11–13, 2005

The Perseid meteor shower, an annual celestial event beloved by millions
of skywatchers around the world, returns to the night sky this coming week.

Sky & Telescope magazine predicts that the Perseid shower will reach its
peak late on Thursday and Friday nights, August 11-12 and 12-13 (for
viewers in North America). The rate of activity should pick up after
midnight until the first light of dawn.

An observer under a dark sky might see more than 60 Perseids per hour
between midnight and dawn. The first-quarter Moon sets by about midnight
on these dates, so moonlight will not interfere.

You'll need no equipment but your eyes. The darker your sky, the better
-- any artificial light pollution in your sky will reduce the number of
meteors visible. But even if you live in an urban or suburban area, you
have a good chance of seeing at least some meteors.

Find a dark spot with a wide-open view of the sky. Bring a reclining
lawn chair and a sleeping bag; the bag not only provides warmth against
the late-night chill but also serves as mosquito armor in this era of
West Nile virus. Cover your remaining exposed parts (including hair and
clothing) with an effective mosquito repellent.

"Go out after about 11 or midnight or so, lie back, and gaze up at the
stars," says Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert. "Relax, be
patient, and let your eyes adapt to the dark. With a little luck you'll
see a 'shooting star' at least every few minutes on average."

Perseids can appear anywhere and everywhere in the sky. So the best
direction to watch is wherever your sky is darkest, probably straight
up. Faint Perseids appear as tiny, quick streaks. Occasional brighter
ones may sail across the heavens for several seconds and leave a brief
train of glowing smoke.

If you trace each meteor's direction of flight backward far enough
across the sky, you'll find that this imaginary line crosses a spot in
the constellation Perseus, near Cassiopeia. This is the shower's
radiant, the perspective point from which all the Perseids would appear
to come if you could see them approaching from the far distance. The
radiant is low in the north-northeast before midnight and rises higher
in the northeast during the early-morning hours.

Don't give up if it's cloudy on the peak nights. The shower lasts for
about two weeks, with good rates in the predawn hours of August 10th
through 15th. (The radiant is always low or below the horizon for
Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South
Africa; therefore few if any Perseids can ever be seen from these regions.)

The Perseid meteoroids are tiny, sand- to pea-size bits of rocky debris
that were shed long ago by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This comet, like others,
is slowly disintegrating as it orbits the Sun. Over the centuries, its
crumbly remains have spread all along its 130-year orbit to form a
sparse "river of rubble" hundreds of millions of miles long.

Earth's own path around the Sun carries us through this stream of
particles every mid-August. The particles, or meteoroids, are traveling
37 miles per second with respect to Earth at the place where we
encounter them. So when one of them strikes the upper atmosphere (about
50 to 80 miles up), it creates a quick, white-hot streak of superheated air.

For several years in the early 1990s the Perseids performed
spectacularly, flaring with outbursts of up to hundreds of meteors
visible per hour. The rubble streams responsible for these outbursts
were probably shed during Comet Swift-Tuttle's swing by the Sun in 1862.
In recent years, though, the shower has returned to normal.

More about the Perseids and how to watch them -- including how to make a
scientific meteor count and where to report it -- appears in the August
2005 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine and online in the articles listed
at the end of this press release.

Sky & Telescope is pleased to make several publication-quality
illustrations and broadcast-quality animations available to the news
media. Permission is granted for one-time, nonexclusive use in print and
broadcast media, as long as appropriate credits (as noted in each
caption) are included. Web publication must include a link to
SkyandTelescope.com .

Sky Publishing Corp. was founded in 1941 by Charles A. Federer Jr. and
Helen Spence Federer, the original editors of Sky & Telescope magazine.
The company's headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to Sky &
Telescope and SkyandTelescope.com, the company publishes Night Sky
magazine (a bimonthly for beginners with a Web site at NightSkyMag.com),
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atlases, posters, prints, globes, and other fine astronomy products.

Related Articles:

* Meteors: A Primer
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...ticle_91_1.asp
* Basics of Meteor Observing
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...ticle_98_1.asp
* Advanced Meteor Observing
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_102_1.asp
* Here Come the Perseids!
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...cle_1557_1.asp
* The Discovery of the Perseid Meteors
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing...icle_124_1.asp