Experts excited about chance to see tonight’s celestial show
They say the spectacle can best be seen away from trees and city lights
Here’s one thing the coronavirus can’t cancel.
The annual Perseid meteor shower, which NASA calls the best meteor shower of the year — and which inspired singer John Denver to write “Rocky Mountain
High” nearly 50 years ago — peaks this week.
Depending on the weather and where viewers watch, the celestial spectacle could deliver as many as 50 to 75 shooting stars per hour over California and much of the United States, with the most expected between tonight after sunset until to the early hours of Wednesday morning.
“The Perseids are a reliable meteor shower,” said Andrew Fraknoi, emeritus chairman of the astronomy department at
Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. “And it’s in August, when we have warm summer nights, when most kids aren’t in school. It’s a great time for families to be able to go outside and take a look.”
The Perseid meteor shower, first documented by Chinese astronomers in 36 A.D., is visible every year between late July and the middle of August.
But the “shooting stars” aren’t really stars. The meteor shower occurs every year when Earth,
as it orbits around the sun, crosses a trail of dust and dirt from a famous comet, Swift-Tuttle, which itself orbits the sun once every 133 years. The comet is just a huge ball of ice, with rocks, dust and other debris inside it. With each pass around the sun, some of that debris breaks away and is left behind in the comet’s wake, creating a giant oval that extends from beyond Pluto to around the sun.
As Earth passes through that debris field each year, some of those tiny bits of sand, metal and rock burn up when they come into Earth’s atmosphere, creating the flashing trails we see across the night sky.
That’s right: What looks like a huge streak of fire in the night sky — an astounding, powerful pyrotechnic marvel — is usually just a little piece of grit, smaller than a thumbtack, miles up in the sky. But it is moving at 132,000 miles per hour, or nearly 37 miles per second, and burning at up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it fizzles.
“What you are seeing burning up is a little piece of dirt, which is part of the original pieces that formed the solar system 5 billion years ago,” Fraknoi said. “It’s kind of neat.”
So, how should you watch it?
The best way is to dress warmly, go outside, turn off lights and look for a broad patch of sky, away from trees. If you can drive to a dark rural location, like a road or park in the hills around the Bay Area away from city lights, you’ll have a better chance of seeing more meteors.
“Pick an observing spot away from bright lights, lay on your back, and look up!” said Emily Clay of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in a blog post Thursday. “You don’t need any special equipment to view the Perseids — just your eyes.”
It’s better not to use binoculars or a telescope. Their field of vision is too narrow.
And, says Fraknoi, be sure to give your eyes at least 15 minutes to adjust to the dark.
“The mistake people make most often is that they don’t allow their eyes to adapt,” he said. “They get out of the car, they look out and say ‘the newspaper lied to me!’ And they give up. In a movie theater you can’t see what’s on the floor until your eyes adapt. Not waiting is a mistake.”
Fog or clouds can block the view, so locations away from the coast are best.
Apart from inspiring people about nature and space for hundreds of generations, the Perseids also inspired a famous song. In
1971, singer John Denver and several friends took a camping trip to Williams Lake, near Aspen, Colorado, to watch the Perseids. Denver, then 27, was so moved he wrote “Rocky Mountain High,” which became a smash hit for lyrics like “I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky” and “shadow from the starlight is softer than a lullaby.”
“Imagine a moonless night in the Rockies in the dead of summer and you have it,” he wrote later in his autobiography. “I had insisted to everybody that it was going to be a glorious display.”
Denver died in 1997 after a light plane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay. Ten years later, state legislators named his Perseid-inspired ballad one of Colorado’s two official state songs.
“The Earth is just one planet among many, and we are in a cosmic setting,” said Fraknoi. “That can help make our problems seem a little bit smaller. Kids find astronomy and dinosaurs to be the most exciting parts of science. Stars, planets, Mars, and space exploration are really exciting to them. We can’t show them dinosaurs any more, except in museums. But we can still show them the sky.”