NEW YORK — The annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak this weekend, sending bright trails of light streaking across the night sky.
With only a sliver of moon in the sky, conditions this year will be ideal for seeing lots of meteors.
"If you've got nice clear weather and a good dark sky, you go out just before dawn and you'll see a Perseid per minute or so," said NASA meteor scientist Bill Cooke. "That's a pretty good show."
FILE - In this long exposure photo, a streak appears in the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower at the Guadarrama mountains, near Madrid, in the early hours of Aug. 12, 2016. The best viewing for the annual shower visible around the world will be from Saturday night, Aug. 12, 2023, local time, into early Sunday morning, when viewers might be able to spot a meteor per minute. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)
Here's how to watch the meteor shower:
WHAT ARE THE PERSEIDS?
The Perseids — one of the biggest meteor showers we can see — occur every year in the late summer. Meteor showers happen when the Earth moves through fields of debris floating around in space. The Perseids come from comet Swift-Tuttle, a big ball of ice and rock that sheds pieces of dusty debris as it orbits around the sun. When the Earth passes by, those bits get caught in our atmosphere and burn up, creating the streaking lights. The Perseids get their name from the constellation Perseus, because the meteors' paths appear to start out from this point in the sky.
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WHEN IS THE SHOWER?
This year's shower is already active, but the main event will be this weekend, when the shower reaches its peak from Saturday night into Sunday morning. Starting around 11 p.m. local time Saturday, a few meteors will start to show up — maybe one every 15 minutes, Cooke estimated. They'll keep picking up the pace until before dawn on Sunday, when "you'll see meteors appear all over the place," he said.
HOW CAN I SEE THEM?
During this weekend's peak, the moon will be a waning crescent — just a small slice in the sky. That's good news because a bright moon can make it harder to spot the meteors. Last year, the moon was full during the peak. Anyone in the Northern Hemisphere will have a good view this year, as long as the sky is clear of light pollution and clouds. You don't need any equipment to see them, but you will need to give your eyes around half an hour to adjust to the dark. Avoid looking at your cellphone since that can ruin your night vision.
The Perseids can appear anywhere in the sky. So just "lie on your back, look away from the moon and take in as much sky as you can," Cooke said.
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Incredible NASA photos of the sun
Incredible NASA photos of the sun
Every child, at least once in their life, has been admonished to not stare at the sun for so long lest they go blind. But does looking at the sun really cause blindness, or is that just an old wives’ tale? Turns out, it’s a bit of both. The retina most certainly can be damaged by staring straight at the sun, but it would take several minutes of uninterrupted focus for that to happen.
In order to cause permanent injury to the eye, the retina would need to heat up by 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And at the brightest point of the day, when sun-induced eye damage is most likely, the average person can only look at the sun long enough to experience a 39-degree Fahrenheit increase in corneal temperature. After that, our natural defenses take over and our sensitive eyes begin to water and burn, which typically causes us to blink and look away before long-term harm can be done.
Fortunately, there are better and easier ways to get a good look at the sun. We can, for example, peruse NASA’s online gallery of sun photos. Over the last 100 years alone, the agency has taken thousands of photographs of the star. In the following slides, Stacker has rounded up 10 incredible photos of the sun from space taken by the agency. These images are a much clearer and safer way of getting a good look at the glowing ball of gas at the center of our solar system.
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2012 Venus transit
This photo captures the transit of Venus—or the moment in which the planet passes in front of our sun—an event that happens only four times every 243 years. The next Venus transit will happen in 2117, which means no one currently alive is likely to see it ever again.
Magnificent CME erupts
When solar material enters the sun’s atmosphere or the corona, it is often expelled out in what is called a coronal mass ejection (or CME). These CMEs, which are most easily understood as bubbles of electrified gas, cause the auroras that we see at the north and south poles
Mid-level flare
Occasionally, the sun will form solar prominences or looped rings of plasma (hot gas) that extend from the star’s surface into its corona. These prominences take a day to form, and can last for several months, but eventually burst—like the one pictured above—when they become unstable, causing a solar flare.
Giant sunspot erupts
Sunspots, like the ones shown in this image, are areas where the magnetic field is significantly higher than anywhere else on the sun. Because of the way these sunspots affect pressure on the star (their increased magnetic pressure decreases the atmospheric pressure of the corona) they are incredibly volatile and often create dramatic solar flares.
Magnetic connections
This photo from NASA shows how the magnetic poles created by various active regions on the sun can link up, or connect, to make swirling and looping patterns across the star’s surface.
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Snaking filament
Essentially the same thing as solar prominences—magnetic loops of hot gas that extend out and away from the sun—filaments are viewed from the top rather than the side. If this particular filament were stretched out, it would be 533,000 miles long, which, according to NASA, is longer than 67 Earths laid side-by-side.
Coronal hole front and center
This picture captures a coronal hole or a spot on the sun where the star’s magnetic field is open to space. Solar wind, which contains all types of gasses, escapes through these holes, causing geomagnetic storms (aka auroras) near Earth.
SDO year 6 composite
This composite image covers the space of time between Jan. 2, 2015, and Jan. 28, 2016, and shows which regions of the sun were most active during that span.
Coronal rain, solar storm
A still from a recording done by an orbiting Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (known as TRACE) telescope, this image shows a series of coronal loops extending over the sun’s surface. Coronal loops, which are large amounts of hot plasma that follow the curved lines of magnetic fields, generally arc between pairs of sunspots.
ISS solar transit
Finally, this composite photograph shows the International Space Station as it transits the sun, moving at a speed of about 5 miles per second.
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