Skygazers are setting their alarm clocks and arranging their deckchairs for the annual Perseid meteor shower.
Q: When?
A: It's expected to peak tomorrow night into Thursday morning. But there might be a dress rehearsal tonight when an extra surge of meteors muscles in on the act.
Q: Caused by?
A: A filament of dust newly drifting across Earth's orbit. It is expected to produce a show of mostly-faint meteors over Europe and Asia, possibly involving 200 meteors an hour.
Q: Where do they come from?
A: Comet Swift-Tuttle. It was discovered by
the Americans Lewis Swift and Horace
Tuttle in 1862. Three years later, Giovanni Schiaparelli realised it was the source of the Perseid meteors, so called because the meteors stream out of the constellation Perseus.
Q: What causes meteor showers?
A: They occur when earth passes through a trail of debris. The particles light up
briefly as they enter
the atmosphere and
burn up. They can be
as tiny as dust particles but they move at
thousands of miles
an hour. This is likely to be a good year for Perseids.
Q: Why?
A: Two reasons. First, the moon is new in mid-August, so moonlight won't spoil the show. Second, the extra surge will give skywatchers something more to look out for. It's relatively young and boiled off Swift-Tuttle in 1862. Other dust in the cloud is perhaps thousands of years old. It's more dispersed and responsible for the month-long shower that peaks tomorrow.
Q: Where can it be seen?
A: The best way to
watch it is to find an open view of the
north-east sky. Because of the way Swift-Tuttle's orbit is tilted, its dust falls on Earth's northern hemisphere.
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