This weekend is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, one of the best-known and largest celestial events visible from Earth.
The meteors have been visible to viewers for the past few days, and will get an even better view during the event’s peak on Friday night.
“Meteorites are these little pieces of space dust that hit the earth and burn up, and when that happens we see them in the sky as a shooting star or a shooting star,” says Scott Young, the astronomer at the Manitoba Museum Planetarium . . “Meteor is sort of the official name for these objects, and on any given night you can probably see one or two if you’re lucky, but on certain nights of the year, Earth passes through a large cloud of cosmic dust. and when you get all that dust on Earth in the same night, you get a lot of meteors. So we call it a meteor shower.”
Young also says that 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 between August 11 and 13, somewhere in that range because we’re going through the dust bunny left by a comet crossing Earth’s orbit. Now, that doesn’t always fly say you will see them all. things that affect the Earth, and the moment may happen during the day for you. It may be cloudy, or like this year, near the full moon. When the full moon is in the altitude, it’s hard to see some of these fainter meteors. what would you 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 time, 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 to be honest, it’s not a one-night event. It’s it builds up over the previous couple of weeks and every night there will be more and more meteor showers until the peak and then after the peak, it fades away for a couple of weeks.”
The comet that causes the meteor shower is the Swift–Tuttle comet, discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle in 1862.
“Each meteor shower throughout the year has its own source objects, most of them are comets, and we know that as we approach the comet’s orbit in our orbit, we will see this meteor shower. Indeed , are named after the constellations in the sky where the meteors appear to come from When we’re looking at the sky, it looks like the meteors in the Perseid meteor shower will come from the constellation Perseus, which is ‘rises in the northeastern part of the sky 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 like the moon or lights from the city”. She also suggests putting away your phone, because the bright light will take time for your eyes to adjust to the dark sky, and some of the fainter shooting stars may be missed.
“This is one of those things where you have to unplug, disconnect and just lie under the stars, relax and look up. It’s a great therapeutic way to connect with the sky.”
Typically, on the event’s peak day, Young will go out with a camera across the sky and stream 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, viewers can go there anyway.