Annual celestial spectacle: The Perseid meteor shower is at its peak today. On Tuesday night, you can expect to see 20 to 30 shooting stars in the sky every hour – including some particularly bright “fireballs.” Weather and visibility conditions are pretty good this year. And besides the Perseids, there’s another celestial spectacle in store for you in the coming days.
As every year in August, shooting star hunters will be able to enjoy one of the most spectacular meteor showers of the year: the Perseids, particularly bright and numerous. These are remnants of dust ranging from grains of sand to the size of a pea that escaped into space a long time ago from the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Every 133 years, it passes its closest point to the sun, leaving behind fresh dust.
When the earth the dust cloud of Comets As they pass each other in their orbit, the small particles pass through the upper atmosphere at 216,000 kilometers per hour, making the air around them glow due to the high friction. Larger comet fragments even generate so much friction that they trail a particularly bright and long-lasting tail behind them. Such “fireballs” occur more frequently during the Perseids.
20 to 30 meteors per hour
This year, the Perseids will peak on Monday afternoon. They are of course invisible to us in the bright daytime sky, but even in the evening and at night, grains of comet dust rain down on the Earth’s atmosphere and turn into shooting stars. Astronomers expect 20 to 30 meteors per hour this year. Under optimal conditions, you can see a shooting star every two to three minutes.
The best chance to see as many observations as possible is after midnight and in the morning. By then, the moon has already set and no longer interferes with the observation with its light, as Diana Hannikainen from the magazine “Sky & Telescope” explains. The weather will probably also play its part and will offer us a mild summer night in Germany today with only a few clouds.
Here’s How to Chase Shooting Stars
If you want to see a lot of Perseids, you should go to a place that is as dark as possible, ideally outside the light-polluted city, and above all be patient. Because the shooting stars often come in spurts, followed by lulls. Stargazers should therefore take a picnic blanket or a deckchair with them so that they can relax and look at the sky for longer. However, you should keep your smartphone in your pocket, because our eyes need about 20 minutes to get used to the darkness and the bright screen immediately cancels out any progress.
If you want to go hunting for the Perseids in the early evening, you’ll need to look east, to the constellation that gives it its name, Perseus. This is the optical origin of the shooting stars – their so-called radiant. Shortly after dark, you won’t see many shooting stars, but there are more so-called “grazers” that travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at a very shallow angle and can therefore be observed for a particularly long period.
Later in the night, when the constellation Perseus is higher, the number of shooting stars increases. Now you only have to look straight up, as Hannikainen explains: “The shooting stars then fly almost everywhere in the sky – you don’t have to look directly at the radiant to see them. The Perseids can be seen until August 24th.” but their number has been steadily decreasing since this afternoon.
Another heavenly spectacle
If you can’t get enough of observing the sky, another treat awaits you on Wednesday, August 14. Because then Jupiter and Mars are very close to each other in the early morning sky. From Earth’s perspective, they are only half the width of a little finger apart.
To see radiant Jupiter and reddish Mars side by side, simply look east-northeast, roughly in the direction the sun is currently rising. The planetary duo is nestled between the horns of the constellation Taurus, the star cluster being the Pleiades not far from him at the top right and the orange Aldebaran on the right. With a good pair of binoculars you can even see the… four large moons of Jupiter recognize.
Source: Max Planck Society, Sky & Telescope
August 12, 2024 -Anna Manz