Good Clean Fun: Meteor Shower With a Friend

You're in for a treat, if local weather conditions cooperate by keeping cloud cover at bay. Not even a fairly bright moon, whose mid-week phase is approximately two-thirds full, is likely to spoil the fun and wreck the spectacle.

The annual Perseid meteor shower is passing through a planetary orbit near you, and all you need is a viewing location with minimal light pollution, a blanket and your sense of wonder and amazement.

Appearing annually at about this time, the Perseids are generated by the interaction between our atmospheres with the bits of space debris left in the wake of the comet Swift-Tuttle, whose last pass by us came in 1992. Their name is given from the fact that most of the meteors appear to come from the direction of the constellation Perseus.

While meteor activity from the Perseids can start ramping up during July, the maximum concentration of shooting stars is expected to occur during the evening and wee hours of Tue., Aug. 11 into Wed., Aug. 12.

NASA's Bill Cooke explains to National Geographic why the Perseids provide the best annual opportunity to observe the phenomenon:

"Visually, the best are the Geminids. But December nights are cold, and people don't want to freeze their rears off."

Photo courtesy of Halfblue, via Wikimedia Commons