Look up! The Perseids, one of the year’s best meteor showers, peaks next week.
One of the best shows in the night sky is coming up next week. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on Wednesday night, and this year it is not to be missed!
Right now, as Earth travels along its orbit around the Sun, the planet is passing through a stream of debris left behind by a comet known as 109P/Swift-Tuttle. This comet only passes through the inner solar system once every 133 years or so. However, each year we are treated to a reminder that it’s out there, as Earth sweeps up the bits of icy debris it leaves behind on each pass. When these tiny bits of ice and rock plunge into the atmosphere, they produce the streaks of light we call the Perseid meteor shower.
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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)
According to the International Meteor Organization (IMO), under ideal conditions, observers typically see anywhere from 50-75 meteors per hour during the Perseids peak, which occurs around the 12th of August every year. Sometimes, this shower can deliver as many as 100 meteors per hour or more.
The Perseids radiant — where the meteors appear to originate from — is located in the northern sky, near the constellation Perseus. It never sets below the horizon at this time of year. So, rather than having to wait for the radiant to rise during the night, we can start watching for Perseids as soon as the Sun has completely set.
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The location of the Perseids radiant at around midnight on August 11-12. Credit: Stellarium/Scott Sutherland
Even now, a week before the meteor shower peak, viewers can see perhaps 10-20 Perseids per hour throughout the night. The peak on August 11-12 is the absolute best night to watch. If skies are cloudy that night or the timing isn’t good, NASA says that the most likely time to see meteors, otherwise, is a couple of days on either side of the peak.
Whatever night you get out to watch, the best time to see the Perseids during the night is usually in the hours between midnight and dawn. That is when the sky tends to be the darkest. Also, the meteor shower radiant is high in the sky at that time, which means that we are looking more or less straight into the path of the meteoroid stream.
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This graph shows the average Perseid meteor activity from 2014-2020. Credits: Graph and background image courtesy NASA
This year, viewing will likely be better than we’ve seen for the past few years, due to the Moon. With the shower peaking only a few days after the New Moon, there will only be a thin crescent Moon in the sky that night, which will set just a few hours after nightfall. This will leave behind a nice dark night sky, which will make it easier for us to see the show!
Read on for tips on how to get the most out of watching a meteor shower.
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
Meteor showers happen when Earth encounters a stream of ice, dust, and rock left behind from a comet (or sometimes a special kind of asteroid). As Earth sweeps through the stream, the bits of debris plunge into the planet’s atmosphere, travelling anywhere from 54,000 to 255,000 kilometres per hour. At that speed, these meteoroids compress the air molecules in their path, squeezing them together until they glow white-hot.
The bigger the piece of debris, the brighter and longer-lasting the meteor will be.
Watch below: Dozens of Perseid fireballs captured by NASA in 2020
The Perseids occur every year between July 17 and August 26, as Earth passes through the stream of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. 109P/Swift-Tuttle was last seen in the inner solar system in 1992. Right now, it’s far out in the solar system, near the orbit of Neptune, and still headed even farther out. It will return in late 2125.
METEOR? METEOROID? METEORITE?
The bright streaks seen from these showers are called meteors.
A meteoroid is a piece of dust, rock or ice floating through space, left over from the formation of our solar system. The smallest – only a few millimetres wide – tend to be called __micrometeoroids. Anything larger than a metre in diameter is usually called an asteroid.
A primer on meteoroids, meteors and meteorites. Credits: Scott Sutherland/NASA JPL (Asteroids Ida & Dactyl)/NASA Earth Observatory (Blue Marble)
The more massive an object is as it enters Earth’s atmosphere, the brighter the resulting meteor will be. The brightest are called fireballs, while a fireball that ends with an explosion is known as a bolide.
Some fireballs and bolides result in bits of the meteoroid reaching to the ground. When these are found, they are called meteorites.
The Perseids are one of the strongest meteor showers of the entire year, and this alone makes it worth watching. However, there are two other ways this meteor shower distinguishes itself.
First, it has the most fireball meteors of any annual shower.
In the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Observer’s Handbook 2021, Philip McClausland writes “Fireballs are exceptionally bright meteors that are spectacular enough to light up a wide area and attract public attention.”
Watch below: An all-sky camera captures a brilliant Perseid fireball
The second is the ability of some Perseid meteors to leave behind a phenomenon known as a persistent train.
Meteors typically flash for a second and are gone. Fireballs can last up to 10 seconds. Every once in a while, though, a meteor will leave behind a trail of glowing ‘smoke’. These can remain visible for up to several minutes or possibly for more than an hour.
Spotting persistent trains is pretty common, depending on the meteor shower. They have only rarely been recorded, though. Studies of them go back decades, but there is little hard evidence to study the phenomenon. Still, scientists have narrowed their cause to one of two likely reasons: ionization or chemiluminescence.
Ionization means that an atom or molecule gains or loses electrons and thus takes on a negative or positive charge. In the case of a persistent train, a fast-moving meteoroid strips away electrons from air molecules along their path. When these ionized molecules pick up a stray electron to balance out their charge, they release a small burst of light.
Chemiluminescence is the production of light through a chemical reaction. When metals like iron and nickel vaporize off the surface of a meteoroid, they can chemically react with ozone and oxygen to produce a glow. Since these processes take much longer than the original meteor flash, the train can persist for some time after the flash goes out.
Watch below to see a persistent train produced by a December Geminids meteor
One of these explanations may account for these glowing trains, or both may cover different occurrences, at different times, and even between individual meteors. It will apparently take more sightings and recordings of this phenomenon to explain them fully.
Here is an essential guide on how to get the most out of meteor shower events.
First off, there’s no need to have a telescope or binoculars to watch a meteor shower. Those are great if you want to check out other objects in the sky at the same time — such as Jupiter and Saturn, which are up all night these days. When watching a meteor shower, though, telescopes and binoculars actually make it harder to see the event because they restrict your field of view.
Here’s the three things needed for watching meteor showers:
Clear skies,
Dark skies, and
Patience.
Even a few hours of cloudy skies can ruin an attempt to see a meteor shower. Since the weather is continually changing, be sure to check for updates on The Weather Network on TV, on our website, or from our app.
Living in cities makes it very difficult to see meteor showers. Those living in suburban areas, with dark back yards shielded from street lights by trees and surrounding houses, may see the brightest meteors. Rural areas offer the best viewing, though, as they are far away from city light pollution.
For most Canadians, simply driving out into the surrounding rural areas is usually good enough to get under dark skies. However, if you live anywhere from Windsor to Quebec City, that will be more difficult. Unfortunately, getting far enough outside of one city to escape its light pollution tends to put you under the light pollution dome of the next city over.
Watch below: What light pollution is doing to city views of the Milky Way
In these areas, there are a few dark sky preserves. A skywatcher’s best bet for dark skies is usually to drive north and seek out the various Ontario provincial parks or Quebec provincial parks. Even if you’re confined to the parking lot, after hours, these are usually excellent locations to watch (and you don’t run the risk of trespassing on someone’s property).
Once you have verified you have clear skies, and you have limited your exposure to light pollution, this is where having patience comes in.
For best viewing, give your eyes time to adapt to the dark. Typically, this takes about 30 minutes of avoiding any sources of bright light (includes cellphone screens). Just looking up into the sky during this time works fine, and you may even catch some of the brighter meteors in the process.
Lastly, the graphics presented for meteor showers often give a ‘radiant’ point on the field of stars, showing from where the meteors appear to originate. Meteors can flash through the sky anywhere above your head, though. So, don’t focus on any particular point in the sky. Instead, just look straight up and take in as much of the sky as you can, all at once. Also, since our peripheral vision tends to be better at night, you may be surprised at how many meteors you can catch from the corner of your eye!
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
