MAKING A GOOD IMPRESSION
The two most impressive meteor showers in the year are the Perseid shower on August 11th (continuing overnight into the 12th) and the Leonid shower on November 17 & 18. There are lots of other ‘little’ meteor showers sprinkled throughout the year (more than one every month) and can produce some fine blazing meteors but these two are generally thought of as the “biggies”.
In fact, the two best meteor showers I have ever seen would have been the Leonids in 2002 which was a 99-year-cycle peak and the first time there were so many meteors that I actually saw two in the sky at the same time. Secondly, the Perseids in 2015 from Hilton Head were almost as spectacular.
SCOPE OUT
At the stargazes I put on I’m frequently asked about whether I’ll be using my telescope to see whatever meteor shower happens to be happening right then. Actually, telescopes are useless at meteor showers; here’s why.
The field of view of a telescope is a lot smaller chunk of sky than most people expect. Usually, it’s about the size of a dime at arm’s length and gets smaller from there as you increase magnification.
Meteors can appear anywhere in the sky at any time and typically last for only a second and are gone. So before you could even reach for your telescope to point it there, it’s gone. So you don’t need any optical equipment to see a good show. When they asked David Levy (famous comet hunter) what he was going to use to observe comet Hale-Bopp he replied, “Binoculars and a 6-pack”! Meteor showers are very much the same. You’ll probably want the following items:
Reclining lounge chair
Hat (brimless)
Light blanket
Bug spray
Music? (earbuds if it’s a group situation and you’re by yourself)
Beverage
Friend
GOOD CONDITIONING
You need to be in the proper viewing environment to have the best show. So try and get away from city lights if you can to some darker skies. If that’s too much trouble then find a place where it’s at least dark right around you with no security lights or street lights in your face. The reason for this is that meteors are all different brightnesses and if you want to see the dim ones, you need to let your eyes dark-adapt otherwise all you’ll see are the big streakers which are relatively few and far between so the event won’t be as much fun overall.
The Moon can be a damaging factor by being so bright as to wash out all the but brightest meteors, but here in 2021 the Moon sets early in the night and is out of the way for pretty much the whole thing.
HOW TO
Each shower has a “radiant” or specific point of origin in the sky. For the Perseids, it’s the constellation Perseus which comes up in the Northeast about 10:30PM so you should lay out your lounge chair with your feet pointing in that general direction. Then lean your lounge chair back far enough that you can see the most sky possible. Meteors can appear anywhere in the sky but you can always trace them back to the radiant if they are a “shower member” If you see a meteor that is going a different direction and doesn’t trace, well that’s your non-Perseid ‘bonus meteor’ for the night!
And that is basically it! Try not to fall asleep by keeping your eyes moving and scanning the sky to find the little ones. When you see one, try tracing it back to the radiant.
WHEN TO
You can see meteors any time after it gets dark but the ‘big show’ is almost always after midnight, up until just before dawn. So if you’re serious and plan on being out for more than 30 minutes you might want to have some coffee or tea to keep you sharp.
WHAT ARE METEORS?
Meteors are essentially bits of solar system debris that hit the Earth’s atmosphere going really fast, like 37 miles per second fast!
A little tiny ‘flick’ of a streak is something about the size of a grain of sand ranging up to something made of rock or metal chunks about the size of a softball that create a blazing fireball across a large bit of sky, leaving a glowing trail behind that can persist as long as 30 seconds.
Sometimes you’ll even see them explode at the end which some observers say is accompanied by sound, after many seconds of delay for the sound to arrive.
where do they come from?
The meteors you see during a shower event is caused by the Earth plowing into the debris from a comet who’s orbit just happens to cross Earth’s orbit. That’s why each of the individual showers all occur on the same day year after year.
The Nucleus of a Comet
Comets are really dirty, dusty, gassy things that leave a wake of this stuff in their highly elliptical orbits so that over the eons, even if the comet itself is not nearby it’s orbit is filled with all manner of ejected debris. So on August 11th the Earth plows into the debris stream from Comet Swift-Tuttle
why better after midnight?
Well, as the Earth spins on its axis at 3am the part of Earth you’re on is the leading edge of the planet, plowing head-on into the debris stream as we orbit the Sun; essentially you are “on the hood of the car” now. It’s very similar to driving in a snowstorm, the snow is falling straight down but your motion through it makes it look like this:
It’s just that the scale of things is much bigger! This also is a good illustration of why each shower has a shower ‘radiant’ point which is just whatever star constellation happens to be in the background as we run into the cometary dust and rock particles.
Happy Meteor Watching!
Bill the Sky Guy
August, 2021