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Perseid Meteor Showers

Posted by michael on from the crop-circle dept.

obfuscated writes "'Flying gravel bank' attacks the Earth's atmosphere; damage unknown. Visible now and peaking on August 12th, the Perseid meteor shower is back to trained and amateur sky watchers. At its peak as many as 60 or more shooting stars can be visible per hour from the Northern Hemisphere. This year's viewing should be especially good since the 'Earth is expected to encounter the core of the Perseid swarm, where meteoroid concentration is densest, next Monday.' Space.com as well as MSN has the full text."

7 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Light pollution campaign by Aliks · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't expect we'll see much in Western Europe. There just aren't any wide open spaces any more.

    Check out how bad it is on this map at Atlas

    Maybe we should have a slashdot appeal to turn out all the lights on Monday night.

    Here's wishing dark skies to everyone.

  2. The scar of light pollution by Elm0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I often like to sit out underneath the stars with a close girl-friend of mine, but one thing stands in the way of us seeing the natural beauty of the stars: Light Pollution.

    When you mention this to people they often admit to not having noticed it before; after all, when was the last time you've been somewhere that strange sodium yellow streak wasn't shooting across the sky? If you weren't thinking about it you might take it to be a natural aura.

    I saw a photo a while back (on the printed page, I've searched on Google and couldn't find it) of the night sky a 1000 miles west of Sydney Australia : the sky was still scared by the bright lights.

    I found this picture on Google of light pollution from space: Light pollution over Canada circa 1975 As far as I am aware, this is of Canada, all though the picture isn't very clear I'm afraid it does illustrate a point about the long-reaching effects of light pollution.

    On the greater impact outside of amateur sky watches, I can imagine this greatly hampers the efforts of earth-bound telescopes, and obviously explains why they are in such remote locations.

    Is there anywhere on earth with NO light pollution?

    1. Re:The scar of light pollution by Zipster · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sure there are, I can drive a hour north (I'm in far north-west Queensland, Australia) and the only light pollution is from those damn bright stars. When I was a bit younger we used to go on family camping trips and lay under the stars watching satellites, not something I could do in the city.

      --
      "I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
    2. Re:The scar of light pollution by Triv · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I live in New York City. Here you'd be lucky to see the north star on a normal night. Ground lights and buildings obstructing your view do not for good shower viewing make.

      However, a good portion of my friends live in central Jersey. During the last major shower a few of us were lying on the hood of a car in the middle of nowhere, freezing our collective asses of, watching the sky falling. Granted, it wasn't as clear as it could've been, but the contrast between there and NYC was amazing.

      Triv

  3. cnn.com by reshu-wan-kenobi · · Score: 1, Interesting

    has a really cool colored picture with their story covering this.. thought i was having a flashback..

  4. Light Pollution in US by xeroh · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Mapof light pollution in the US.


    Finding a dark sky near you.


    It looks like I-35 is roughly the dividing line between a much lighter East and generally darker West. Luckily, I live just west of said road, and can head further west to watch from the top of a big bald rock.

  5. imprecise language by dos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > as many as 60 or more

    It's bad enough that we have to put up with this kind of vague language in advertisements... but now in technical writing? "As many as" signifies an upper bound. "or more" extends that, which makes that bound meaningless. If some code takes "as much as 5 ms or more" to run, how fast is it? If a new PC came with "as much as 256 MB or more" RAM, would you buy it?

    Argh!