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Perseid Meteor Shower To Peak This Weekend
Krishna Dagli writes "This weekend provides one of the year's best opportunities to see some "shooting stars". The annual Perseid meteor display is expected to peak on Friday and Saturday night. Meteors are bits of dust or rock that plunge into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, making bright streaks in the sky. It does not take a large object to produce a visible meteor — most are the size of a grain of sand or a small pebble."
Hello this is Slashdot. I don't think we really needed the 3rd grade scienst lesson.
Plus you know it is sort of Sunday here in the UK, doesn't that make this news story rather useless to a large population of the readers (not to mention Americans who will be sleeping at 11pm - Guy trying to be funny. It's not funny that Slashdotters sit up late, save the joke).
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This year's Perseid shower is a dud, due to a nearly full moon.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Really, what's the point of even posting this now? If people weren't aware of it, it's too late to do anything about it now. Personally, living in an urban area, I would have to travel an hour or more away just to get far enough out of the city to be able to see this thing, so maybe a post about it on, say, thursday night or friday afternoon would have been more helpful.
I've seen the Perseid shower before, on Boy Scout trips as a youth, but watching it with my own son would be quite an experience. Oh well, this story at least reminded me of it, so maybe I'll be able to prepare to see it next year.
I went out with my girlfriend tonight to take a look, but it pretty much sucked. I saw one blip and that was all. The moon was far too bright and made viewing impossible.
As it seems closing tags is beyond people here is the correct link for those who can't be bothered going through the rigmarole of copy & paste.
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Wrong. The perseids occur every august.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids. He can see them next year. I agree, though, it would've been nice to have a more timely reminder.
The comet has a period of 133 years, but the Earth passes through the debris left by the comet every year.
That's not true. The distinction between a meteor and a meteorite is that meteors do not fall all the way to the ground, and meteorites do.
This also isn't true. Stuff continues to move out there, so we don't pass through the exact same spot in the debris trail every year. How big the meteor shower is varies from year to year.
I'll let somebody else point out that the orbit is 133 years, not 150.
Put it on your calendar for next year, there won't be any moon to contend with. I took the wife and my Canon 20d out...while I didn't get any good photos of streaking light (I have better luck with lightning,) we did see a few really good ones, but the moon rose about 10:30 and it was a waste after that. The moon is just past full, and was really, really bright tonight.
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This would have told you in plenty of time, for instance - I think it was there before the end of my work-day on Wednesday.
Unfortuntately it's been way too cloudy here (NE England) to see anything, after 2 months of cloudless skies....
And in fact the meteor is the light trail itself, not the lump of matter that creates the light trail by burning (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meteor). The lump is called a meteoroid and any part of it that hits the Earth as anything more than vapour is a meteorite.
Yay for dumbing down science for the masses.
Things like 'fud' and 'wishfulthinking' are perfectly valid as tags - if you want to search for stories that Slashdotters thought were FUD or wishful thinking. There's room for more than one tag - so something tagged 'linux', 'fud' and 'wishfulthinking' would allow people to, say, find stories about Linux that Slashdotters thought were fud (or wishful thinking) or just plainly about Linux.
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It is only peaking this weekend. It will be visible a great deal longer - till august 20th or something. So pack your bags...
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There are also a few other good showers this year to catch. Both Orionids (Oct 21st) and Geminids (Dec 14th) are said to be decent without so much moon interference. Or just fill your calendar with a whole list. Now if I only knew a good place to drive to get away from the city lights. Any suggestions for those of us living in Northern VA?
a. Skyline Drive
b. Blue Ridge Parkway
c. move
Lots of showers throughout the year, although the Perseids is generally the best.
The Leonids, Geminids, and Orionids are the next biggest showers. You can find out here:
Meteor Shower article.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Probably because peak visibility of that meteor shower happens between midnight and dawn Pacific time, so most of the country had plenty of time to pull it together and drive out for an all-nighter.
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Almost anybody who lives in the mountains of Colorado knows you don't need oxygen to climb a 14er. You say 10,000 feet requires oxygen? That means that all the people who are skiing at places like Crested Butte would need oxygen, since you get off the ski lift more than a thousand feet above that altitude. Skiing is also much more vigorous than flying a plane, but people don't go blind from lack of oxygen while doing it, even above 10,000 feet.
FAA regulations are overly cautious due to other circumstances which could create compound problems in which lives would be at stake. FAR 91.211 says that oxygen is required after 30 minutes of flying between 12,500 and 14,000 feet, or immediately when flying above 14,000 feet in a non-pressurized cabin. Supplemental oxygen is only suggested for flying at 10,000 feet during daylight, or 6,000 at night. But that's just a suggestion, not a requirement.
As for hypoxia during star gazing at 14,000 feet, this isn't a vigorous activity we're talking about. You'd likely not be starved for oxygen by merely laying on the ground.
Of course, none of this considers that the person who did the star gazing may have been acclimated to the altitude by spending months or years in high altitudes. When I was a kid in Colorado I saw more stars than I've ever seen anywhere else.