Slashdot Mirror
Perseid Meteor Shower This Week
fejikso writes "Space Daily and the BBC
announce the coming of the annual Perseid meteor shower, and forecasters say it could be unusually good. The cosmic spectacle is produced by the debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When the shower peaks, by August 12, sky watchers can expect to see dozens, possibly even hundreds, of meteors per hour."
And here in Michigan, the forcasts say not to expect clear sky until next week. The only time I can remember Michigan not having crappy weather during a major meteor shower was when I was in Florida - which of course, had crappy weather every night that week.
The article says "as many as 200 meteors per hour", so:
200 meteors/3600 seconds = 1 meteor/18 seconds
So roughly 18 seconds per meteor. The reason they use per hour is that with something so random, the time between any two is wildly variable, and you need a large sample to get accurate rates. Just some statistical ass-covering, I guess.
I imagine the Perseids are pretty darned smelly. Imagine the stink from only showering once per year!
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Does anybody have actual times for the estimated start and end of the shower? Both of these articles regurgitate the same "go out at 2am" bullshit with no timezone listed. Should I go out at 2am UTC, 2am EDT, 2am HST?
Better start preparing a list of wishes for each of the shooting stars that we can be expecting here then :)
I live in a big metropolitan area (DFW), and two years ago during the Leonids, I had to drive about an hour and a half out to see them really well (there was also a full moon during the shower, which sucked). So I suggest if you're in a big city, head for the country.
This should be a pretty good show, though. While we won't have a new moon (different from full moon) on the 12th, it'll be damn close. Plus, in this area, the moon will be below the horizon until around 3:30am. I can't wait (and I'm sure I'll be a zombie at work the next day, too)!
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
As in Tunguska at Google news
I cannot submit stories anymore. why?
Well, if you consider a 50-year-old conspiracy theory news, I can't say I'm sorry.
The NASA website has a Fluxtimator that predicts the meteor flux (meteors per hour) for various cities around the world during the night of August 11-12. It will also work for the Leonid shower in November. It looks like the peak is fairly sharp, and drops off quickly thereafter.
The International Dark-Sky Association has a locator for finding the places near your location in the US with least light pollution.
Eureka. Yes, the "marine layer" is so thick today, you could let off a nuke at 20,000 feet, and we'd never know. I'm old enough that I've actually seen the sun. My kids still think its a myth. Good to know there's someone else from the former Russian part of California hereabouts.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It's likely to be because the standardised measurement for a meteor shower is the Zenithal Hourly Rate - ie, the number of meteors per hour you would expect to see if the radiant (the point in the sky where the meteors appear to be coming from) was directly overhead under ideal conditions.
Essentially, it's a calculation that takes into account height of the radiant above the horizon for a particular hour, and the average of the magnitude of the faintest stars you can see at your location while observing.
I think every recent reference I've seen to the Perseids quotes a rate of 200 per hour, but I remember that being quoted as the typical ZHR for the shower when I first started observing them in the mid-70s. Somewhere along the way, the ZHR concept has got lost in the media reporting.
In real life, expect to see one or two every few minutes, with an occasional flurry of several over the space of a few seconds if you've got proper dark skies and no moon.
Once in a while, there may be a really spectacular bolide (fireball) that's well worth the endless hours staring upwards wondering what all the fuss is about.