This years Perseid meteor shower should be a good one. I encourage you to get out and bag some Perseid meteors. Perseids come from the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle and are an annual favorite for many sky observers. The Moon should be setting just as the shower starts picking up. Look for meteors any time after dark on the nights of August 11, 12 and 13. The shower actually peaks on the night of August 12th. For best results find a dark sky away from city lights and relax on a reclining lawn chair. Keep your gaze on the starry sky and wait. The shower’s radiant located near the Double Cluster in Perseus will clear the horizon an hour or so before midnight but you’ll spot meteors prior to that happening. The meteor rate should pick up as the night goes on until they reach 50 to 100 per hour. This normally will occur in the early morning hours.

You can look for “earthgrazers” right after dark and until 10 p.m. or so. Earthgrazers are meteors that skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond. They appear when the radiant of a meteor shower is near the horizon, spewing meteoroids not down, but horizontally overhead. They are rare and usually speculator to see as they can be very long lived, starting in the eastern sky and slowly crossing the zenith and fading of in the western sky. You’ll know it if you spot an earthgrazer! I saw three in one night during the peak of the Perseids a decade ago and still remember it quite well.

Here are some fun things to do while watching a meteor shower. 1) Count the number of meteors you see and compare your numbers with your fellow meteor watchers. 2) Trace the meteor back to where it originated in the sky. If it points back to the constellation Perseus then you know you saw a Perseid. If it doesn’t then you probably saw a “sporadic” meteor (one not associated with the current shower) 3) Try capturing images of some of the brighter meteors by using a tripod mounted camera with wide field lens. Try long exposures of several minutes with fast focal ratios and shoot different parts of the sky. You might catch a brilliant fireball but if not you’ll have some cool star trail shots showing the different colors (temperatures) of the stars.

Good luck and clear skies!

Scott