REMINDER --->August Perseid Meteor shower

**AJE** · 08-11-2007, 06:55 AM

REMINDER :arrow: The annual Perseid Meteor shower peaks Sunday Night into Monday Morning. But usually a few nights before, and a few nights after the peak can bring good viewing.

My best show was Schoolhouse Beach, Washington Island Door County WI in 2000.

That’s why from midnight to dawn tonight, or tomorrow night into Monday morning are the best times to watch this year’s Perseid meteor shower.

The moon is new on Sunday, or between the Earth and sun. This new moon will leave the night sky dark all this weekend for the Perseid meteors. These meteors are named for the constellation Perseus the Hero. If you trace the paths of the meteors backwards, they seem to stream from this constellation.

To watch the show, find a dark, open sky. Get away from city lights, and give your eyes at least 20 minutes to adapt to the dark. So take your family/friends out for late night of watching to the skies! The Perseid shower favors northern hemisphere skywatchers. Again, the best time to watch: Sunday morning, late Sunday night and Monday morning before dawn. At its peak, the Perseids typically produce 60 or more meteors per hour.

2001 Stan Richard, Minocqua, Wisconsin

**AJE** · 08-11-2007, 06:59 AM

Larry Sessions an Astronomer Says:

Quote:

For anyone in North America, the predicted best time is late Sunday night until dawn Monday. If I had limited time, I would pick around the time of the predicted peak, 1 a.m. Monday morning for Massachusetts and 10 p.m. Sunday for Lewiston.

The actual predicted peak time is 1 a.m. EDT, midnight CDT, 11 p.m. (Sunday) MDT and 10 p.m. PDT (adjust for other time zones). This is true whether you’re in New York or Los Angeles, Miami or Seattle or anywhere in Canada (except the very far north in Canada and Alaska where it doesn’t get dark enough).

You do NOT want to emphasize a specific spot in the sky. There is a specific spot in Perseus, but rarely do meteors actually appear there. [If you face northeast at about, say, 11 p.m., Perseus is near the horizon, more or less directly beneath Cassiopeia.] It’s just that if you traced the path of all shower meteors back, they would intersect at that point, called the radiant. The meteors typically appear some degrees from the radiant, and can appear halfway (or more) across the sky. You just want to look in the general direction. For late Sunday night, that’s northeast. It gets higher as the night goes on, such that by dawn on Monday it is nearly overhead for most of North America. Again, don’t worry about a specific point in the sky, just look in the general direction.

And do NOT use binoculars or telescopes, as these greatly reduce the amount of sky you can see. What you want here is to be able to see as wide a swath of sky as you can. (There are plently of other things to look at with binoculars and telescopes — but meteors aren’t one of them.)

**AJE** · 08-11-2007, 07:02 AM

Meteor showers Sunday night
SAT., AUG 11, 2007 - 12:27 AM
Wisconsin State Journal

The best thing about this weekend 's Perseid meteor showers, according to UW-Madison astronomer Jim Lattis, is that it doesn 't take any fancy equipment or knowledge to enjoy the spectacle.

"All you need, ' ' Lattis said, "is a lawn chair. ' '

:arrow:
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/loca...205154&ntpid=1

**AJE** · 08-11-2007, 07:16 AM

This is a real plus for those who want to see more meteors and not just the very bright ones. Bright, fast meteors — many leaving glowing trails visible for several seconds — characterize the Perseid meteor shower.

Origins:

The Perseid meteoroids are tiny, sand- to pea-size bits of rocky debris that were shed long ago by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This comet, like others, is slowly disintegrating as it orbits the Sun. Over the centuries, its crumbly remains have spread all along its 130-year orbit to form a sparse "river of rubble" hundreds of millions of miles long.

Earth's own path around the Sun carries us through this stream of particles every mid-August. The particles, or meteoroids, are traveling 37 miles per second with respect to Earth at the place where we encounter them. So when one of them strikes the upper atmosphere (about 80 miles up), it creates a quick, white-hot streak of superheated air.

For several years in the early 1990s the Perseids performed spectacularly, flaring with outbursts of up to hundreds of meteors visible per hour. The rubble streams responsible for these outbursts were probably shed during Comet Swift-Tuttle's swing by the Sun in 1862. In recent years, though, the shower has returned to normal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8)

The Perseids are Coming
http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/caer/...re/perseid.htm

Quote:

Every August, a celestial event takes place. (Celestial is something that has to do with the sky or heavens.) The August event is the Perseid meteor shower.

Meteor showers are created when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet. Perseid meteors come from the comet, Swift-Tuttle. Comets are just like large dirty snowballs and when bits of dusty debris melt away from the comet when it nears the sun, they form a cloud that the earth passes through. The Earth is now entering the cloud of comet dust from Swift-Tuttle.

If you're lucky, you just might see dozens of "shooting stars." These are really light streaks caused by meteors, which are tiny pieces of debris, the size of a pinhead or a grain of sand. They enter the Earth's atmosphere and cause the air to glow as they pass through it.

The Perseids will best be seen after 11:00 p.m on August 12. Grab your sleeping bag, blanket or lawn chair, go outside and lie down with your toes pointing northeast.

If you can't stay up that late or don't want to get up in the middle of the night, try looking for the Perseids at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. when the constellation Perseus is low on the eastern horizon. You probably won't see many meteors, but the ones you do see could be very bright. Shooting stars that emerge from the horizon and streak horizontally through the atmosphere are called "Earthgrazers."

Happy sky watching. Hope you enjoy the show!

**CarolsCritterCare** · 08-12-2007, 09:11 AM

Great info I'll be watching......will make sure to tell my son. He likes things like this as well.
Thanks

pk · 08-13-2007, 09:27 AM

We heard alot about this while vacationing in the Upper Peninsula this past weekend. The only downside is the fact that we were told the best time to really see it would be after midnight to 3:00 a.m.

Well I'm a night person , but my hubby is not and the fact that where we were staying we needed to drive a ways to really see it clearly over the lake..and he wanted to sleep and I was to nervous to drive in the dark out to the lake...I'm bad at getting back to places and figured I would never find this remote house again and miss breakfast! lol So we decided just to sleep through this one.

Really wish a person did not have to sleep, it certainly takes to much time out of a 24 hour period! lol

pk

pk · 08-13-2007, 09:32 AM

Looking again at the pictures on here I really wish we did manage to get some time in to see this awesome site. The pictures I could have taken would have been worth the 'no sleep' lol

When up at Copper Harbor which was actually quite a distance from where we were staying..someone was telling us that it was a really perfect place to see it all. Copper Harbor being at the very top of the Peninsula.

Hopefully we will be back there at the time this is really going on strong again and we can make more of a point to watch it all. I know my daughter was pretty disappointed that we did not do this but we did get some pictures of the sunset one evening. I'll be posting pictures soon of things we saw while at the UP.

pk

**AJE** · 08-14-2007, 07:39 AM

Well folks I did head out at 12:30AM Monday morning. Extraterrestrial objects were in deed falling amongst the skylight. I drove about 20 minutes west of Appleton and sat out there for about a 1/2 hour during which times I did see some meteorites with very bright trails shoot overhead. The constellations were very elegant as well. Since I'm not a night owl I could hold up all night and I did go by myself. So when my eyes started playing tricks I decided it was time to head back home.

lol nice show though!

**AJE** · 08-14-2007, 07:43 AM

Meteors and Meteor Showers: The Science
By Robert Roy Britt

Imagine a baseball zipping along at 30,000 miles per hour. That's how big and fast many meteors are. And though some are bigger than baseballs, most are more like grains of sand. The larger meteors are sometimes broken bits off asteroids or other planets. The small stuff is often dust left by a passing comet.

Entry into the atmosphere
When they plow through the atmosphere, meteors are heated to more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and they glow. Meteors are not heated by friction, as is commonly thought. A phenomenon called ram pressure is at work. A meteor compresses air in front of it. The air heats up, in turn heating the meteor.

The intense heat vaporizes most meteors, creating what we call shooting stars. (Most become visible at around 60 miles up.) Some large meteors splatter, causing a brighter flash called a fireball, and an explosion, which can often be heard up to 30 miles away. When meteors hit the ground, they're called meteorites. Some meteors are bits broken off asteroids, others -- mere cosmic dust -- are cast off by comets. (And one more term: A meteoroid is an object in space that may, if it enters our atmosphere, become a meteor.)

For the complete article please see:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...eteors-ez.html

**AJE** · 08-14-2007, 10:33 AM

What to tell the Insurance Companies: Umm yes I have sustained car damage from a extra terrestrial object!
8)

The Peekskill meteor of November 18, 1992 was captured on 16 independent videos and then struck a car. Documented as brighter than the full Moon, the spectacular fireball crossed parts of several US states during its 40 seconds of glory before landing in Peekskill, New York. The resulting meteorite, pictured here, is composed of dense rock and has the size and mass of an extremely heavy bowling ball. If you are lucky enough to find a meteorite just after impact, do not pick it up -- parts of it are likely to be either very hot or very cold. Also FYI they can be worth a lot of money since some of the meteorites are composed of minerals not found on Earth.