The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The meteor shower show you don’t want to miss
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. This month, have big pockets.
For if the rainy days and cloudy nights break right, the Perseid meteor shower will be on grand display. What better ways to spend a warm summer night than watching meteors shoot across the sky?
“I would urge anyone, if you haven’t checked out the Perseids in a while, go out and do it this year,” said Diana Hannikainen, observing editor of Sky & Telescope Magazine.
“This year it will be, probably, one of the best,” said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the US. Naval Observatory in Washington DC.
The annual event peaks this year on the nights of Aug. 11-12, with the most meteors — maybe 50 or more an hour — flaring after midnight on the 12th.
What makes this year’s show so special is that there will be no moon glow to wash the sky with light. There will only be a crescent moon that will set early.
Which makes local astronomers eager to get out and settle in under the sky.
“It sounds promising,” said Cliff Wattley of Ridgefield, who helps organize the astronomy nights at New Pond Farm nature center in Redding.
“If the weather cooperates, I will be watching,” said Bill Cloutier of New Milford, one of the leaders of the John J. McCarthy Observatory in New Milford.
But here’s one of the beauties of the Perseids. While its peak nights are Aug. 11-12, the nights leading up to that peak, and the nights afterward will still give us shooting stars to see.
“They are long,” Cloutier said of the showers, which start in mid-July and end in late August.
“It’s actually already started,” said Chester of the Naval Observatory
The Perseids are also remarkably reliable, unlike other meteor showers, which can be brilliant one year, pallid the next.
And it’s a summer event — no mittens. No mukluks.
“The Geminids in December are just about as good,” said Monty Robson of New Milford, the director of the McCarthy Observatory. “But here, you’ve got the warm weather.”
The Perseids occur when the earth’s orbit around the sun crosses the debris trail of Comet Swift-Tuttle.
Swift-Tuttle is a large periodic comet that swings from the Kuiper Belt near Pluto around the sun every 133 years. It last passed by in 1992 and will do so again in 2126.
It gets its name from two American astronomers — Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle — who both observed it in July, 1862.
Comets are big balls of ice and dirt that are remnants from the formation of the solar system. SwiftTuttle is very big, with its nucleus measuring about 16 miles across — nearly
twice the size of the object that killed off the dinosaurs when it crashed into the earth 66 million years ago.
When comets near the sun, comets warm and melt, leaving behind some of their dirt behind, floating in space. When the earth crosses the trail of this debris, bits the size of a grain of sand burn up as
they hit the earth’s atmosphere. We see them as shooting stars.
The Perseids get their name because the meteors seem to shoot out of the constellation Perseus in the northeast night sky.
Chinese astronomers made a record of the Perseids in 35 AD. More recently, so did John Denver, who saw them raining fire in the sky over the Rockies.
Medieval Christian called the shower the Tears of St. Lawrence.
Lawrence — the patron saint of librarians, cooks, bakers and comedians — was one of the six early deacons of the Christian Church in Rome. The Emperor Valerian ordered them executed and Lawrence died a martyr’s death on Aug. 10, 258 AD — a day before the shower peaks.
(Legend has it that the Romans roasted Lawrence over hot coals on a gridiron. Rather than crying out in pain, he cracked wise, saying at one point “Turn Me Over. I’m done on this side.” Hence, his veneration by jokesters.)
What’s good about meteor showers is this. You don’t need a telescope or binoculars. All you need is bug spray and a dark place, away from light pollution. Set up a lawn chair or throw down a blanket, lest your sky-turned neck starts to spasm.
“I heard of a guy who floated down a river, lying in the bottom of a canoe, watching the Perseids,” said Robson of the McCarthy Observatory. “It’s a neat thing.”