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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the easier-than-watching-when-you're-dead dept.

The Perseid meteor shower of 2020 peaks tonight! Here's how to watch live.:

The Perseids are back! This week, you can catch the 2020 Perseid meteor shower, a favorite of many skywatchers, as it peaks thanks to four different webcasts over the next two days from the Virtual Telescope Project, NASA, Lowell Observatory and the online astronomy learning platform Slooh.

The Perseids meteor shower appears when Earth passes through the rubble left by Comet Swift-Tuttle and peaks this week in the early morning hours on Wednesday (Aug. 12), according to NASA. But you should still be able to enjoy great views of the Perseids on Aug. 11 and Aug. 13 as well if you can find your way to some dark skies.

Perseid meteor shower 2020: When, where & how to see it:

Spectators can expect to see the greatest number of meteors during the shower's peak on the morning of August 12, according to NASA. Years without moonlight see higher rates of meteors per hour, and in outburst years (such as in 2016) the rate can be between 150-200 meteors an hour.

[...] To best see the Perseids, go to the darkest possible location and lean back to observe as much sky as possible directly above you.

The best time to look for meteors is in the pre-dawn hours. While the meteors will peak in the morning on Aug. 12, they will also be very visible on Aug. 11 and 13. Even outside of this peak timeframe, you should be able to spot a few meteors between midnight and dawn any morning the week before or after this date, according to NASA. TO see the meteors, look up and to the north. Those in southern latitudes can look toward the northeast to see more meteors.

[...] When you sit back to watch a meteor shower, you're actually seeing the pieces of comet debris heat up as they enter the atmosphere and burn up in a bright burst of light, streaking a vivid path across the sky as they travel at 37 miles (59 km) per second. When they're in space, the pieces of debris are called "meteoroids," but when they reach Earth's atmosphere, they're designated as "meteors." If a piece makes it all the way down to Earth without burning up, it graduates to "meteorite." Most of the meteors in the Perseids are much too small for that; they're about the size of a grain of sand.

[...] The key to seeing a meteor shower is "to take in as much sky as possible," [...] Go to a dark area, in the suburbs or countryside, and prepare to sit outside for a few hours. It takes about 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark, and the longer you wait outside, the more you'll see. A rate of 60-70 meteors per hour, for instance, means around one meteor per minute, including faint streaks along with bright, fireball-generating ones.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:37AM (#1035416)

    It's Patchy Fog!