Aug 12 2007
Viewing the Perseid meteor shower in Amesbury
Randye and I were up late this past Saturday night viewing the Perseid meteor shower. Even though this yearly astronomical event peaks on Sunday night, weather forecasts are predicting cloudiness and thunderstorms in our area, so we decided to catch it a day earlier. And boy, was it worth it!
For a prime viewing location, we drove to Woodsom Farm, here in Amesbury, near the New Hampshire border, and walked to the top of a grassy hill. The spot is perfect for viewing astronomical events, except for an unusually bright street lamp down by the street that seems to be aimed straight at the hill. But for our meteor viewing purposes, this light didn’t matter.
We set up our lawn chairs at the hill’s summit, donned hats and clothes to battle the slight chill and the voracious mosquitoes, slathered ourselves in citrus oil-based bug repellent (more effective than typical commercial varieties), sat back, and waited for the show to begin.
The Perseid meteor shower is actually Planet Earth orbiting through a long trail of dusty debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which takes 130 years to circle the sun. When the Earth passes close the comet’s orbit, the debris left behind the comet’s wake flies through our atmosphere at a wicked 37 miles per second, creating beautiful streaks of light in the mid-summer night sky. What makes viewing the meteor shower even better this year is that the moon will be new on Sunday, and there won’t be any reflection to ruin the show.
We sat under a beautiful night sky for a little over an hour, from 11:15 p.m. to just past 12:15 a.m. In that time, we saw at least 25 to 30 meteors streak through the sky, leaving bright or faint trails. The meteors mostly went from the east to the west, northeast to southwest and north to south. If anyone has good viewing conditions on Sunday night, they’ll likely be able to view from 90 to 100 meteors per hour for a few hours after midnight.
A Perseid meteor streaks through the night sky. (Photo by Chuck Hunt/Space.com)
Viewing conditions were so good last night, we were also able to make out the Milky Way, a faint milky white band of light that is actually the main plane of the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy. Even though many of the stars we see at night are not on this plane, they are actually part of the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years in diameter and 1,000 light years thick.
2 responses so far
Did you by any chance use your telescope that night?
Ah, good question Dad K. We did not use a telescope that night. The two main reasons were that the meteors were moving to fast through the sky to track and that they were too close to use with out telescope.