Saturday, August 11, 2012

Perseids meteor shower – clouded viewing

Slim chance late Sunday to catch one of the best sky shows of the year – Monday night should be clear for the end of the show
By Will Collette

The annual August sky show put on by the Perseid meteor has been mostly a wash-out for our area. At peak (tonight), skywatchers can see as many as 100 meteors per hour, mostly dust left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle, hitting the atmosphere at speeds around 60 kilometers per second.

The National Weather Service forecast for tonight is a total wash-out for Charlestown – potentially heavy rain and certainly thick cloud cover. However, there is a slim chance of some clearing late Sunday, after midnight, when there may still be a decent number of meteors to see in the trailing edge of the Perseid shower. A few more will flash through the skies late Monday night when the weather forecast is for a nice clear sky.

Last year, astronauts in the International Space Station captured some Perseid strikes from above. See one of their photos (courtesy of NASA) after the jump.




From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day
Credit: Ron Garan, ISS Expedition 28 CrewNASA

Denizens of planet Earth watched last year's Perseid meteor shower by looking up into the bright moonlit night sky. But this remarkable view captured on August 13, 2011 by astronaut Ron Garan looks down on a Perseid meteor. From Garan's perspective onboard the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of about 380 kilometers, the Perseid meteors streak below, swept up dust left from comet Swift-Tuttle heated to incandescence. The glowing comet dust grains are traveling at about 60 kilometers per second through the denser atmosphere around 100 kilometers above Earth's surface. In this case, the foreshortened meteor flash is right of frame center, below the curving limb of the Earth and a layer of greenish airglow, just below bright star Arcturus. Want to look up at this year's Perseid meteor shower? You're in luck. This weekend the shower should be near its peak, with less interference from a waning crescent Moon rising a few hours before the Sun. EDITOR'S NOTE: weather permitting