Perseid meteor – Watch the Skies

Shooting Stars: Annual Perseid Meteor Shower to Peak Aug. 11-12

By Wayne Smith

They may not attract as much attention as last month’s daylight fireball over New York City, but stargazers can still anticipate seeing some shooting stars with the upcoming Perseid meteor shower. Caused by Earth passing through trails of debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, the shower has become famous over the centuries because of its consistent display of celestial fireworks.

A bright meteor leaves a trail of light amongst a sky full of stars. Silhouettes of trees frame the bottom of the image. — In this 30 second exposure, a meteor streaks across the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021, in Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

“The Perseids is the best annual meteor shower for the casual stargazer,” said Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Not only is the shower rich in bright meteors and fireballs – No. 1 in fact – it also peaks in mid-August when the weather is still warm and comfortable. This year, the Perseid maximum will occur on the night of Aug. 11 and pre-dawn hours of Aug. 12. You’ll start seeing meteors from the shower around 11 p.m. local time and the rates will increase until dawn. If you miss the night of the 11th, you will also be able to see quite a few on the night of the 12th between those times.”

The best way to see the Perseids is to find the darkest possible sky and visit between midnight and dawn on the morning of Aug. 12. Allow about 45 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Lie on your back and look straight up. Avoid looking at cell phones or tablets because their bright screens ruin night vision and take your eyes off the sky.

Perseid meteors travel at the blistering speed of 132,000 mph – or 500 times faster than the fastest car in the world. At that speed, even a smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light when it collides with Earth’s atmosphere. Peak temperatures can exceed 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as they speed across the sky. The Perseids pose no danger to people on the ground as practically all burn up 60 miles above our planet.

The first Perseid captured by NASA’s All Sky Meteor Camera Network was recorded at 9:48 p.m. EDT on July 23. The meteor – about as bright as the planet Jupiter, so not quite bright enough to be considered a fireball – was caused by a piece of Comet Swift-Tuttle about 5 millimeters in diameter entering the atmosphere over the Atlantic and burning up 66 miles above St. Cloud, Florida, just south of Orlando.

A bright meteor streaks across the dark night sky, leaving a trail of white light. — NASA’s All Sky Meteor Camera Network captured its first Perseid at 9:48 p.m. EDT on July 23.

Rare Fireball in New York, New York Not Perseids

It wasn’t part of the Perseids, but a rare daylight fireball streaked across the sky over New York City at 11:15 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, July 16. The event gained national attention and was reported in media outlets across the U.S.

The fireball, defined as a meteor brighter than the planet Venus, is estimated to have soared over New York City before traversing a short path southwest and disintegrating about 31 miles above Mountainside, New Jersey. Cooke said the meteor was likely about 1 foot in diameter, which would have made the rock bright enough to see during the day. Seeing a meteor of this size is rarer than catching sight of the smaller particles a few millimeters in size typically seen in the night sky.

“To see one in the daytime over a populated area like New York is fairly rare,” Cooke said during an interview with ABC 7 in New York.

The Meteoroid Environments Office studies meteoroids in space so that NASA can protect our nation’s satellites, spacecraft and even astronauts aboard the International Space Station from these bits of tiny space debris.

For more skywatching highlights in April, check out Jet Propulsion Lab’s What’s Up series.

Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256.544.0034
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov

Enjoy the Warming Weather Under These 3 Upcoming Meteor Showers

Still basking in that post-eclipse celestial glow? We’ve got great news – there is plenty of reasons to look up again and we are here to share in the skywatching excitement as meteor showers top the upcoming headlines.

It’s been a quiet few months for meteors, but the Lyrid meteor shower peaks overnight April 21-22. Unfortunately, the Moon will be at greater than 90% waxing gibbous so a lot of light interference will outshine the fainter meteors. Even under perfect conditions – dark, away from city lights, open view of the sky – only a few meteors per hour are expected to be visible to the naked eye because of the bright Moon. For a dedicated observer, it may still be worth spotting members of one of the oldest known meteor showers – the Lyrids have been observed for 2,700 years!

The Eta Aquarids meteor shower peaks during early May each year. These meteors are known for their speed, which can leave glowing “trains” (incandescent bits of debris in the wake of the meteor) which last for several seconds to minutes. This is expected to be an outburst year, exclaims Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Visual rates could be as high as one per minute in the Southern Hemisphere, with just slightly less in the Northern.” The moon will be a waning crescent during its peak overnight May 4-5, so there will not be much moonlight interference.

A sky full of falling meteors. — Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May 2023. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. Credit: Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava

Cooke is most excited for the Perseid meteor shower in mid-August, “The Perseids are always a stunner and this year, there will be no moonlight to spoil the show.” During its peak overnight August 12-13, about 50 to 100 meteors per hour can be seen! Perseids are also known for their fireballs. Fireballs are larger explosions of light and color that can persist longer than an average meteor streak.

In this 30 second exposure, a meteor streaks across the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021, in Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Happy skywatching!

By Lauren Perkins
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Best Meteor Shower of the Year Peaks This Weekend

The NASA All Sky Fireball Network is already detecting the first meteors of this year’s Perseid meteor shower! The meteor shower peaks on the night of August 12 as the Earth passes through the dustiest debris of comet Swift-Tuttle’s trails.

A bright white streak is in the bottom left corner on a dark grey almost black background. — On July 26, 2023, the NASA All Sky Fireball Network detected the first Perseid meteor of the year. (NASA/All Sky Fireball Network)

The Perseid meteor shower is often considered to be the best meteor shower of the year due to its high rates and pleasant late-summer temperatures. Unlike last year’s shower coinciding with the full moon, this year’s moon will be a waning crescent, allowing even some of the fainter meteors to be seen.

So, how many can you see?

“People in the U.S. can reasonably expect to see around 40 Perseids in the hour just before dawn on the peak nights. That’s about one every couple of minutes, which is not bad,” said Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “However, we are assuming you are out in the country, well away from cities and suburbs.”

The brighter skies of suburban areas greatly reduce the rates, with 10 or fewer expected in an hour.

You can see the Perseid meteor shower best in the Northern Hemisphere. All you need to catch the show is a clear sky, darkness, and a bit of patience. You don’t need to look in any particular direction; meteors can generally be seen all over the sky.

A graph shows the Perseid Radiant with time. — This diagram, based on data from the NASA Fireball Network, shows the change in the direction of the Perseid radiant with time. This is caused by Earth’s motion about the Sun, causing the radiant to appear to “drift” with respect to the background stars. (Danielle Moser, NASA Meteoroid Environment Office)

The Perseids appear to radiate from a point in the constellation Perseus, and each meteor has a similar orbit. Meteor showers take their name from the location of their point of origin, or what is known as the radiant.

A Space Shuttle being wheeled out with people standing in the foreground. — On June 1, 1993, the orbiter Discovery is shown here being rolled into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for mating with the external tank and twin solid rocket boosters. At the time, Discovery was being prepared for mission STS-51, targeted for a mid-July liftoff. (NASA/JSC)

Fun fact:
The Perseid meteor shower is the only meteor shower to delay a Space Shuttle launch. In 1993, the NASA – STS-51 launch was delayed due to concerns about the Perseid meteor shower activity being forecast to be extremely heavy, increasing the chance that a spacecraft in Earth orbit could be damaged by a piece of the debris.

By Lauren Perkins
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

Perseids Meteor Shower on the Way

The Perseids are back! Well… sort of.

Usually bringing one of the most vivid annual meteor showers visible in Earth’s night sky, commonly delivering 50-100 “shooting stars” per hour at its height, the Perseids will peak Aug. 12 and 13. There’s just one problem: the full Moon.

A shower of Perseid meteors lights up the sky in 2009 in this NASA time-lapse image. (NASA/JPL)

“Sadly, this year’s Perseids peak will see the worst possible circumstances for spotters,” said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Most of us in North America would normally see 50 or 60 meteors per hour,” he said, “but this year, during the normal peak, the full Moon will reduce that to 10-20 per hour at best.”

The Moon is so much brighter than anything else in the night sky, and it will wash out all, but the very brightest Perseids as they streak through our atmosphere and burn up far overhead.

As the full Moon subsides, the Perseids will begin to wane Aug. 21-22 and cease completely by Sept. 1. They’re the debris remnants of Comet Swift-Tuttle, a lumbering “snowball” composed of ice, rock, and dust, which orbits our Sun every 133 years. The comet itself was last visible to us in 1992 and won’t pass our way again until 2125.

How far back sightings of the Perseids actually go remains a matter of some contention, Cooke said. The comet itself wasn’t identified until 1862, but the meteor shower was seen over medieval Europe. The annual event came to be known as “the Tears of St. Lawrence,” named for the last of seven Roman church deacons martyred by the emperor Valerian in August of the year 258.

So, this is probably not the best year to make a special trip in order to see the Perseids, but, if you find yourself outside between midnight and dawn on Aug. 13, don’t forget to look up anyway. Because you never know – you might just catch one of the bright Perseid meteors that defies the glare of the Moon. Also, the occasional early Perseid can streak across the sky as much as a week beforehand.

If you want to know what else is in the sky for August, check out the latest “What’s Up” video from Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

by Rick Smith

How many Perseids will I see in 2021?

By Bill Cooke, NASA Meteoroid Environments Office

Many Perseid-related news stories and social media posts state that the maximum rate is about 100 meteors per hour, which is a lot. So, folks get excited and go out on the peak night, braving mosquitos and other nightly hazards. But they are often disappointed; we routinely hear, “I went out and only saw a few meteors. Not even 20, much less 100!” And they would be right. The problem is that the 100 per hour is a theoretical number used by meteor scientists and does not convey what people are actually going to see.

In the 1980’s, meteor researchers were searching for a way to compare the meteor shower rates observed by various individuals and groups across the globe. People were reporting the rates, but the differences in sky conditions, radiant altitude and observer eyesight made getting a comprehensive view of shower activity difficult.

So, the meteor researchers put their heads together and came up with the concept of a ZHR, or Zenithal Hourly Rate. The ZHR is what you get after you correct the observed rates for the sky conditions, the altitude of the radiant above the horizon and observer biases. In other words, it is basically what a perfect observer would see under perfect skies with the meteor shower radiant straight overhead – which never happens!

The often-quoted ZHRs overestimate the meteor rates people actually see – sometimes by a lot. Fortunately, we can take the ZHR and invert things to get the hourly rates for certain locations and circumstances – it’s only math, after all. We have done this for select locations in the United States, producing the following maps.

These maps show the hourly rates that can be expected on the night of the Perseid shower’s peak, provided there are no clouds in the sky. (It’s hard to account for partial cloud cover.)

These rates assume you are out in the country, where lots of stars and the Milky Way are visible and no clouds, of course:

So, instead of 100 Perseids per hour, people in the U.S. can reasonably expect to see around 40-ish Perseids in the hour just before dawn on the peak nights. That’s about one every couple of minutes – not bad. However, we are assuming you are out in the country, well away from cities and suburbs.

What rates can you expect if you want to do your Perseid watching from the neighborhood? We also computed that:

The brighter skies of the suburbs greatly cut down the rates. We have gone from a Perseid every couple of minutes to one every 6-7 minutes – a factor of three reduction. This explains the great disappointment expressed by many casual Perseid watchers; they go outside, expecting to see at least a meteor a minute and end up with 10 or less in an hour. The brightness of your sky is everything in meteor observing – you have to get away from the lights!

But what about those in cities? The rates are close to zero:

Ugh! City dwellers might see a Perseid or two in an hour. Not very inspiring. Perhaps the only good news is that, if someone in a city sees a Perseid, it has to be really, really bright and spectacular.

Want to see Perseids? Then head out into the dark – it’s worth it!

Check out our previous blog post, The Perseids are on the Rise, for more information on the Perseids and tips on how to observe them.

The Perseids are on the Rise!

It’s time again for one of the biggest meteor showers of the year! The Perseids are already showing up in our night skies—and when they peak in mid-August, it’s likely to be one of our most impressive skywatching opportunities for a while.

Perseid Meteor image — In this 30 second exposure taken with a circular fish-eye lens, a meteor streaks across the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower on Friday, Aug. 12, 2016 in Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Our meteor-tracking cameras spotted their first Perseid on July 26, but your best chance to see them will start the night of Aug. 11. With the crescent moon setting early, the skies will be dark for the peak viewing hours of midnight (local time) to dawn on Aug. 12.

This chart shows expected levels of Perseid activity for July and August 2021, relative to the peak on Aug. 11-13, ignoring the effects of the Sun, Moon, and clouds. All times are in UTC. Credits: (NASA/MEO/Bill Cooke)

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and far away from light pollution, you might spot more than 40 Perseids an hour! (If you’re in a city, you may only see a few every hour; skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere will also see fewer Perseids, with none visible below about 30 degrees south latitude.) The night of Aug. 12-13 will be another great opportunity to see the Perseids: with a full Moon (and lower meteor activity) during the Perseids’ peak in 2022 and a waning crescent high in the sky for 2023, this might be your best chance to do some summer skywatching for a few years.

Find somewhere comfortable, avoiding bright lights as much as possible (yes, including your phone), and give your eyes some time to adjust to the dark—up to half an hour if you can. The Perseids will appear as quick, small streaks of light: they get their name because they look like they’re coming from the direction of the constellation Perseus (near Aries and Taurus in the night sky), but Perseids in that area can be hard to spot from the perspective of Earth. So just look up and enjoy the show!

If you can’t see the Perseids where you live, join NASA to watch them on social media! Tune in overnight Aug. 11-12 (10 PM–5 AM CDT; 3–10 AM UTC) on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to look for meteors with space fans from around the world. If skies are cloudy the night of Aug. 11, we’ll try again the same time on Aug. 12-13. Our livestream is hosted by the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which tracks meteors, fireballs, and other uncommon sights in the night sky to inform the public and help keep our astronauts and spacecraft safe.

Where do the Perseids *actually* come from?

The Perseids are fragments of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits between the Sun and beyond the orbit of Pluto once every 133 years. Every year, the Earth passes near the path of the comet, and the debris left behind by Swift-Tuttle shows up as meteors in our sky. (Don’t worry, there’s no chance that we’ll run into the actual comet anytime soon.)

Where can I go to learn more?

We’ve got some great space-rock lessons for students, starting with the biggest question: what’s the difference between an asteroid and a meteor? Our NASA Space Place site also has a kid-friendly introduction to meteor showers in general. If you’re looking for something a little more hands-on, try this asteroid-building classroom activity—or, for an older audience, learn how to describe rocks like a NASA scientist.

And, if you want to know what else is in the night sky this month, check out the video below from Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s monthly “What’s Up” video series:

Happy skywatching!

by Brice Russ

Look Up! Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Aug. 11-12

Make plans now to stay up late or set the alarm early next week to see a cosmic display of “shooting stars” light up the night sky. Known for it’s fast and bright meteors, the annual Perseid meteor shower is anticipated to be one of the best potential meteor viewing opportunities this year.

The Perseids show up every year in August when Earth ventures through trails of debris left behind by an ancient comet. This year, Earth may be in for a closer encounter than usual with the comet trails that result in meteor shower, setting the stage for a spectacular display.

“Forecasters are predicting a Perseid outburst this year with double normal rates on the night of Aug. 11-12,” said Bill Cooke with NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office in Huntsville, Alabama. “Under perfect conditions, rates could soar to 200 meteors per hour.”

An outburst is a meteor shower with more meteors than usual. The last Perseid outburst occurred in 2009.

How to Watch the Perseids

The best way to see the Perseids is to go outside between midnight and dawn on the morning of Aug. 12. Allow about 45 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Lie on your back and look straight up. Increased activity may also be seen on Aug. 12-13.

For stargazers experiencing cloudy or light-polluted skies, a live broadcast of the Perseid meteor shower will be available via Ustream overnight on Aug. 11-12 and Aug. 13-14, beginning at 10 p.m. EDT.

Perseid Peak Performance

The All Sky camera network captured over 183 multi-station Perseid meteors Saturday night. Some truly spectacular events — see images below.

The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet’s debris. These bits of ice and dust — most over 1,000 years old — burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere to create one of the best meteor showers of the year.