Tonight through Friday, the brightest meteor shower of the year will flit across the sky: the Perseids. Here are the details you need to know (and remember, DON’T get your info off the memes you see on social media; I’ve already seen tons of them are wrong).
- Peak Dates: August 12th – 14th; will still produce meteors for about 10 days after
- Times to Watch: 11pm – 3am; your local sky will be pointed in the direction Earth is moving around the Sun, putting you at the most direct angle of debris impact
- Meteor Quantity: 20-50 per hour; the Perseids are one of the most reliable meteor showers of the year, and if you give yourself 30-60 minutes, you should see a good handful flitting above you
- Direction to Look: constellation Perseus; position changes over the night
- 10pm – 12am: lower northeast sky
- 12am – 2am: middle east-northeast sky
- 3am and to sunrise: high up in the eastern sky
The spot where a majority of the meteors seem to originate from is called the RADIANT. If you trace the lines the meteors make in the sky, most of them will point back to a similar area of the sky.
A few meteors will lie outside this radiant region; these might still be associated with the Perseids, but will be few and far between. The larger meteors you see will come from the same area in Perseus.
STILL IN PROGRESS:
The conjunction of Jupiter and Venus is still occurring. Go outside before sunrise and look in the east to see two bright dots side-by-side. Jupiter will be the upper dot, Venus will be the lower dot. If you watch them each day for the next week, you’ll see them spreading apart, Venus moving downward and Jupiter moving upward.
Reminder that I’m currently back on the east coast in South Carolina until late August, then I’ll return to Arizona on the 25th. Catch me back up in Sedona from August 30th to September 5th!
MY NEXT SCI-FI BOOK!
The 5th book in my science-fiction Recovery series, PURNELL, will be released on October 17th. Check out Books 1-4, which I like to call “a coming of age blended with political drama.” You’ll find space travel, futuristic sports and technologies, plenty of science, physics, and astronomy, and in Book 2, you’ll live what feels like a nature documentary (it’s the most adventurous of the books, and I absolutely studied and researched the heck out of the ecosystems to create the main planet you visit).
Check out my books here.
My next post will show you my van build! The full timelapse video of the build will be released on my YouTube channel tomorrow (Wednesday), so make sure to subscribe and see what I built.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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