Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
This week marks the beginning of peak viewing for the Perseid meteor shower, one of the biggest astronomical events of the year. Shower-viewing also happens to be perfectly suited for the pandemic, since you’re outdoors and can easily social distance. If you want to get the most out of viewing the Perseid meteor shower, here’s everything you need to know.
When’s the best night to watch the Perseid meteor shower?
The Perseid shower lasts from around July 22 to Aug. 22, according to the trusty Farmers’ Almanac. But the peak of the cosmic display starts Aug. 11, and runs through dawn on Aug. 13. Aug. 11 is expected to be the best single night to watch the shower, but Aug. 12 should offer plenty to see, too.
What does the meteor shower look like?
A meteor shower is a singular chance to see the strange and massive forces of the cosmos at work with your naked eye. It is made up of dozens of bright spots streaking across the sky, the kind often inaccurately referred to as “falling stars.” They’re actually tiny specks of matter burning up against the Earth’s atmosphere. They can come in rapid succession or be separated by long pauses. Scanning the sky to catch as many of the streaks as possible is a big part of the fun.
When’s the best time to watch the Perseid meteor shower?
In most years, you’d want to set your alarm clock to view the Perseids a bit before dawn, when deep darkness makes them most visible. But this year, the Perseids are competing with a moon in its last quarter phase, which rises around midnight and casts enough light to interfere with meteor visibility.
So in 2020, you’ll want to look up your local moonrise time and watch the meteor shower before the moon appears. On the East Coast, moonrise is just after midnight. Good news for not-so-early risers.
Where’s the best place to watch the meteor shower?
As with any night-sky phenomenon, darkness is your friend. If you can get outside urban areas for your (socially distanced) viewing party, the reduced ambient light levels will help you see more.
Where should I look for meteors?
Streaking meteors could appear nearly anywhere in the night sky. But as the shower’s name suggests, they’ll be centered around the constellation Perseus, which is in the northern sky near Andromeda.
It might take some star-savvy, but training your eyes on Perseus could improve the show. The Perseid meteor shower will appear to originate near the constellation—though this is a trick of perspective, since the streaking lights are actually vastly closer to Earth than the constellation (see below).
Where can I watch the Perseids online?
If you live in a place where the shower might not be fully visible to the naked eye—such as a light-polluted major city—you might consider the distant-second backup option of watching online. NASA has you covered with a variety of webcasts from the Virtual Telescope Project. You can find those streams here.
What causes the meteor shower?
Like so many things of beauty, the Perseid meteor shower is born of destruction.
In fact, the term “meteor shower” is misleading. Rather than objects falling onto Earth, the visible Perseid “shower” is actually caused by Earth passing through a cloud of space rubble. Specifically, it’s made up of the cast-off shards of the massive Swift-Tuttle comet. Swift-Tuttle is the largest object that regularly passes close to Earth, and when it makes its pass every 133 years, it leaves a huge trail of dust and debris.
Swift-Tuttle leaves so much trash behind that, though the comet itself only visits once in a long while, its immensely long dust-trail is waiting for Earth to pass through every year. The dust and fragments, like the comet, are traveling very fast, helping turn the tiny shards into what look like shooting stars when they contact the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.
