The best meteor shower of the year happens this week.
While we get meteor showers all year round, this is the one with the most shooting stars.
Go out Tuesday night if you can, because that’s the night when the meteors will mostly fly across the sky. Expect to see one on Tuesday about every ten minutes, as long as you are in a dark (no lights) area.
Well, you can still go out every night this week, but the shooting stars will happen less often. So, you just have to wait longer to see one.
The best time to go out is 11pm. This is when the sky will be at its darkest. At midnight the crescent moon rises and adds light to the sky. The darker the night sky, the better you can see the meteor shower.
The annual meteor shower picks up Tuesday.
You can thank the Swift-Tuttle Comet for the light show. As it passes through the Earth each year, some of its pound falls to Earth. Those stone rocks are burned up as they fall through our air. The reason this happens is the same reason why your hands get hot when you rub them for a minute. Friction causes heat. Get enough friction and you can get enough heat to cause something to catch fire. This is also the reason why rubbing two bags together can lead to a fire.
So, when those rocks rub against our air as they fall, they become hot enough to burn up, giving us a beautiful light show.
A comet, by the way, is just a rock.
An asteroid is also a rock, but it is a large one. A comet is a much smaller rock in comparison. They often have rock pieces and punctures behind them as they travel, causing the tail you see in comet photos. The tail is there too, because it’s basically a cloud. If you look up during the day and see a large white cloud, you see an area of tiny little ice pieces too light to fall. That, the tail of a comet has ice pieces, along with the rock fragments, to give that cloudy appearance.
Enjoy looking and when you go outside, look south to see that Jupiter and Saturn shine brightly. They are actually at their brightest at 9 o’clock, which is an hour after sunset.
Meteorouche Peaks Tuesday
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