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| Meteor Shower |
How do you watch a meteor shower? First step: Get a clear sky and dark. Two, pour a cold drink in summer. Three, find a lawn chair, sit and have drinks above.
Finally, look up.
We get not only fireworks on the Fourth of July, but fireworks of nature in mid-August You can view the Perseids - pronounced "PURR-see-id" - meteor shower Sat night. This shower looks to give forth from the constellation Perseus, hence the identify.
Although the Perseids stroll through our skies from July 25 through August 20 of these meteors peak this weekend. You can start watching until the end Saturday night. If you're lucky, you will see a few meteors dart across the cosmos.
You will probably look more aft midnight in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
The International Meteor Organization, and "Observer Handbook 2012" explaining that the zenithal hourly rate is about 90 to 100 meteors per hour. Although you will never see that much, be happy with a few.
The shower will peak allegedly Sunday at 8 pm ET. It's well after sunrise, so many nights of Saturday and Sunday could be your best chance.
Amortization your comments slightly aft midnight, the declining moon upgrades in the east, about 1:30 ET Sunday. Do not worry, though. It's just a croissant and should not be too embarrassing.
The meteors are nothing but a trail of cosmic dust left by comets. On his annual tour around the sun, the Earth feels in these trails. Debris hitting our atmosphere and burns brightly and we see the resultant streaks. Comet Swift-Tuttle leaves the path that causes the Perseid meteors. The dust trail is a "medieval flow, yet compact enough," said Neil Bone in his book "The Meteor". Bone explains that these small dust particles are small, as the size of a grain of sand or instant coffee granules. These small pieces have little structural integrity and burn easily when they hit the upper atmosphere.
This is a special year the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Comet Swift-Tuttle. At the beginning of the Civil War, two men - hundreds of miles away, saw the appearance in July 1862, noted astronomer David H. Levy. Astronomer Lewis Swift was found July 16, 1862, Marathon, NY, about 25 miles north of Binghamton. Because the population Marathon thin, dark skies, there's today a dream of sky gazer.
Meanwhile, the astronomer Horace P. Tuttle saw the comet July 19, 1862, the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just before he joined the Union Army. After in his vocation, Tuttle connected the United States. Naval Observatory. He died in 1923 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church, Va.
