This year’s Perseid meteor shower – the finest of all meteor showers – peaks in the pre-dawn hours tomorrow and Friday morning. If you’ve never seen the Perseid shower, or you’ve only noticed one or two meteorites incidentally from within the city, you really owe it to yourself to get out away from the city lights and catch it. And with the moon giving us ideal conditions, 2010 will be an exceptional year for this celestial show. In Phoenix, the tiny waxing crescent (new) moon sets tonight, Wednesday, August 11, at 8:15 p.m., promising dark skies that are ideal for meteor watching.
The best way to enjoy tonight’s show is to get out of the city. I live in northeast Phoenix, so I like to head east on Dynamite Road toward the Verde River. Ideal viewing requires you to get 100 miles or more away from the city. Sometime after the moon sets, and the later the better, grab a blanket, a pillow, and some water, and head to your dark sky area. Lay out your blanket and pillow and lie down with your feet pointing northeast. Look that direction toward the constellation Perseus, which is the apparent origin of the meteors. Meteors are best viewed with the naked eye, no binoculars or telescopes required.
The Perseid shower is considered the best because it peaks at 50 to 80 meteors per hour. In a really great year, like the one back in 1991, when I happened to catch the shower during an outdoor concert on the lawn in Tempe (roughly where the Madcap Theatre stands today), the meteors are almost continuous. I remember my grandparents telling me when I was very young about them driving across the barren and unpopulated Four Corners region back in the 50s and having to pull the car off the road when the sky just appeared to be exploding with falling stars. They were as much terrified as they were awestricken.
By the way, meteors are the bright streaks you’ll see flashing across the sky, what we commonly call shooting stars. Before they hit our atmosphere and heat to several thousand degrees, they’re called meteoroids. If they make it through the atmosphere without burning up and crash through your roof or into your cornfield, they’re called meteorites. But no worries: A huge percentage of meteors are about the size of a grain of sand, and they burn up completely streaking through our atmosphere.
