Information AboutPerseids |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PERSEIDS | |
| meteor showers | |
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OBSERVATION The famous Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the first known information on these meteors coming from the Far East. In early Europe, the Perseids came to be known as the "tears of St. Lawrence ." The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the greatest activity between August 8 and 14, peaking about August 12 . During the peak, the rate of meteors reaches 60 or more per hour. They can be seen all across the sky, but because of the path of Swift-Tuttle's orbit, Perseids are mostly visible in the Northern Hemisphere . To experience the shower in its full, one should observe in the dark of a clear moonless night, from a point far outside any large cities, where stars are not dimmed by Light Pollution . The Perseids have a broad peak, so the shower is visible for several nights. On any given night, activity starts slowly in the evening but picks up by 11 p.m., when the radiant gets reasonably high in the sky. The meteor rate increases steadily through the night as the radiant rises higher, peaking just before the sky starts to get light, roughly 1½ to 2 hours before sunrise. 2007 The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the new-Moon night of Sunday–Monday, August 12 – August 13 and can be seen from any place in the northern hemisphere. The Perseid meteors appear to stream away from their radiant near the border of Perseus and Cassiopeia . The meteor rate, for an observer at a dark-sky site in the northern temperate latitudes, increases to roughly 30 per hour in the predawn hours on Saturday, 45 per hour on Sunday morning, and 80 per hour before the sky starts to get light on Monday morning. SEE ALSO NOTES EXTERNAL LINKS
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