Posted on 08/12/2018 12:12:54 PM PDT by ETL
The peak of the summer's best meteor shower – the Perseids– peaks overnight tonight (Aug. 12), but you'll need good weather to see it. Just in case your night sky cloudy or hazy, you can check out the annual meteor shower on webcasts online by Slooh, NASA and the Virtual Telescope Project.
You can watch the Perseid meteor shower webcast here, courtesy of the astronomy broadcast service Slooh. The 6-hour webcast begins at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) and you can watch it directly on Slooh.com. During the broadcast, viewers can use the hashtag #Slooh on social media to share Perseids photos, or to ask questions of the experts and astronomers on the show.
"The Perseids are my favorite meteor shower, and they'll be the best shower of the year with high rates of meteors streaking across the sky, and no moonlight to spoil the view," said Slooh astronomer Paul Cox in a statement. "If viewers of our live coverage are lucky enough to have clear skies themselves, they should use Slooh’s commentary as their meteor watching soundtrack." [Perseid Meteor Shower 2018: When, Where & How to See It]
Perseid meteors streak through the sky in this NASA composite image from a past Perseid meteor shower. The meteors appear to be traveling from the same point as the Perseid meteor shower appears to radiate outward from the constellation Perseus.Credit: NASA/Meteorid Environment Office
NASA will also host a live Perseids webcast tonight using video from its all-sky cameras at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The webcast will stream live on the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page. It will begin at about 9 p.m. EDT (0100 Aug. 13 GMT) and continue through the predawn hours of Monday.
"The Perseids are best seen between about 2 a.m. your local time and dawn," NASA officials with the Marshall Space Flight Center Meteoroid Environment Office said in an advisory. "If those hours seem daunting, not to worry! You can go out after dark, around 9 p.m. local time, and see Perseids. Just know that you won't see nearly as many as you would had you gone out during the early morning hours."
The 2018 Perseid meteor shower peaks overnight on Aug. 12-13, 2018. This sky map shows where to look at 11 p.m. local time this weekend. Credit: Sky & Telescope Magazine
You can also check out the Perseids courtesy of the Virtual Telescope project. Astrophysicist Gianluca Masi will start the broadcast live on Aug. 12 at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT).
"This year, because of the excellent sky conditions ... we will be broadcasting our live feed from [Italy's] Castel Santa Maria, where the local community is working on a very important project to restore the local, XVI [16th] century church, of huge historic and artistic value [that was] damaged by several earthquakes," Masi said in a statement.
The Perseid meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the path of Comet Swift-Tuttle, running into the stream of debris that the comet leaves behind. The meteors appear to emanate from the northern constellation Perseus. Technically speaking, the 2018 Perseids run from July 17 to Aug. 24, but the peak is expected on Sunday (Aug. 12). Skywatchers also have a new moon in the sky, so there won't be much moonlight washing out the faint stars.
Lol! I knew at least one person would get it!
Sharp bunch we have here!
Four Yorkshiremen- Monty Python
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
I saw the 1986 shower travelling west over the continental divide in New Mexico. It made driving a bit more dangerous on I10. It’s really dark there and the looks very close
I saw the 1986 shower travelling west over the continental divide in New Mexico. It made driving a bit more dangerous on I10. It’s really dark there and the sky looks very close
I recall one especially incredible year for the November Leonids. It actually got scary. It felt like we were under missile fire. Long thick lingering greyish green smoke trails. An occasional bright orange fireball. It really seemed like we were being pelted with space rocks. Turned out the earth had passed through a particularly heavy climb of comet debris that year. I think they said it happens every 34 or so years.
Worse, it's a lip sync! ;^).
Was kind of a poor viewing year here in Colorado. Peak time was before sundown. Saw maybe 8 over 2 hours last night.
LOL!
I'd take a look at the sky, but suspect it will be like the last two or three things I've looked for (buncha planets, a green comet) -- overcast.
Interesting sidebar:
http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/papers/2016Icarusc.pdf
The age and the probable parent body of the daytime arietid meteor shower [in press]
Abedin Abedin, Paul Wiegert, Petr Pokorn, Peter Brown
Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada N6A 3K7, Canada
Received 7 March 2016
Revised 10 August 2016
Accepted 14 August 2016
Icarus
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/icarus
Abstract: The daytime Arietid meteor shower is active from mid-May to late June and is amongst the strongest of the annual meteor showers, comparable in activity and duration to the Perseids and the Geminids. Due to the daytime nature of the shower, the Arietids have mostly been constrained by radar studies. The Arietids exhibit a long-debated discrepancy in the semi-major axis and the eccentricity of meteoroid orbits as measured by radar and optical surveys. Radar studies yield systematically lower values for the semi-major axis and eccentricity, where the origin of these discrepancies remain unclear... We find the most plausible scenario to be that the age and the formation mechanism of the Arietids is consistent with continuous cometary activity of 96P/Machholz over a time interval of ?12,000 years. The sun-skirting comet P/1999 J6 suggested by [Sekanina, Z., Chodas, P.W., 2005. Origin of the Marsden and Kracht Groups of Sunskirting 922 Comets. I. Association with Comet 96P/Machholz and Its Interplanetary Complex. ApJS 923 161, 551–586. doi:10.1086/497374.] may contribute to the shower, but the comet breakup prior to 950 CE they propose does not reproduce all the characteristics of the observed shower.
Same interesting sidebar, missed this part:
[snip] P/1999 J6 and 96P/Machholz, may have originated from a fragmentation of a single large body, prior to 950 AD (Sekanina and Chodas, 2005). The authors referred to that large parent as the first generation fragment, and deduced a few likely break-up epochs — 150 AD, 350 AD, 500 AD, 700 AD and 950 AD. [/snip]
http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/papers/2016Icarusc.pdf
I hear ya.
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