Perseids

That's called the radiant.

For the Perseids, that radiant lies in Perseus.

The meteoroids aren't actually coming from Perseus.

The stars have nothing to do with them.

But from Earth? Every August, Perseus appears to throw sparks.

That shower usually reaches its maximum around August 12th or 13th.

Under good rural skies, you might see several dozen Perseids an hour near the peak.

The standardized zenithal hourly rate, the theoretical rate under ideal conditions with the radiant directly overhead, can reach 100.

So you get kind of further down the road.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about the Perseid meteor shower that had come up a while back now in early August.

And it was cool getting to see that.

Hopefully you guys got to get out and make some observations of some meteors that were going by i got to do a couple camping trips during that time i think like at the end of july when comet neo eyes was cruising over some of you guys probably got to see that that was cool but during like the end of july is when the perseus start kind of ramping up and then uh it's pretty light it's like it's a chance that you'll see a meteorite or you know a meteor streak across the sky during the evening sky during those weeks but it really starts to kick up and peak I think it's August 10th, 11th, and 12th, sort of in that range, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th.

There's another good one.

I think it's like the Leonid... maybe it's a Leonid shower that's in November.

Um, but for a lot of us in the Northern hemisphere, by that time, it's just like clouded over enough or the, the way that the weather's working just makes it so that you're not really able to make the kind of observations of, uh, of the meteor showers you'd like to, I suppose, even when, uh, like I was in, uh, Hawaii a while back and um I was trying to make observations of some of those things that I hadn't been able to do during the winter months here in Oregon and a lot of that stuff I really wasn't able to see uh in the way that I would have hoped to um or yeah just like the observations of it like we're just I don't know kind of kind of difficult to make so really like yeah the Perseid meteor shower was always one of the coolest ones because it's uh it's kind of it's It's right there, kind of right in a good season where you get to check it out and in a good location for a lot of us here in the Northern Hemisphere and stuff.

I want to say thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Night Sky Podcast.

By the way, these are not uncommon because at this time, late October every year, the Orionids.

But of course, in August, we went through the Perseids.

That's

it.

Yeah.

Because that's when we get the Perseids.

That's when they fall.

Yeah.

Right.

If this had happened during the Perseid or Leonid meteor showers, you would expect to see a spike in impacts because the Earth-Moon system is plowing through a dense cloud of known debris.

But the sky was relatively clear of known streams during this phase of the Artemis 2 mission.

Exactly.

Feeling a little creaky about falling a couple of stories to the ground, I lay down on my back on the narrow parapet with my hands behind my head to soften the concrete a little, and looked straight up into the night sky.

A dawdling, honest Perseid scratched a thin mark of light across the blackness.

I heard a coyote howl.

This was the desert.

Um, the Eta Aquariids is in May.

The Southern Delta Aquariids are in Ju- like July to August, and then the Perseids is in August, mid-August.

And yeah, during that time, you can get a different color Minior, and during the Geminids or the Gemin- yeah, the Geminids, um, one color will debut in the North Hemisphere and one in the South.

So there will be...

Also the orbital velocity of the meteors in perihelion, and by comparing this with the Earth's velocity, the latitude of the radiant enabled the inclination to be determined, while the longitude of the Earth that night was the longitude of the node.

In such a way, Schiaparelli was able to find first the elements of the orbit of the August meteor shower, Perseids, and to show its identity with the orbit of Tuttle's Comet 1862.

Then in January 1867, La Verrier gave the elements of the November meteor shower, Leonids, and Peters of Altona identified these with Oppulser's elements for Temple's Comet 1866.

Schiaparelli having independently attained both of these results.