Stargazers are in treatment early Wednesday as the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak.
The Perseid meteor shower occurs when pieces of the Swift-Tuttle comet hit the Earth’s atmosphere. The meteors began to hover over the skies last month and will peak in the pre-dawn hours of August 12, NASA officials wrote in a blog post.
“Make plans to stay up late the night of August 11 or to wake up early in the morning of August 12,” NASA officials wrote. “The Perseids are best seen between about 2am your local time and breakfast. The moon rises at midnight, so its brightness affects the peak of viewing. “
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The moon will reduce the number of visible meteors from 60 per hour to 15 to 20 per hour. “Even though the phase and presence of the moon will keep the frequency of visible meteors lower, there is still almost one meteor in the peak every two minutes!” according to NASA.
A photographer holds a flashlight to the night sky when Perseid meteors swept across the sky in the Esme district of Usak, Turkey, on August 14, 2018.
(Soner Kilinc / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
A few Perseids will be seen Tuesday after 9 a.m. Tuesday, according to the space agency.
‘If it’s not cloudy, choose a viewing spot away from bright lights, lie on your back and look up! “You do not need any special equipment to view the Perseids – just your eyes,” according to NASA. “Meteors can generally be seen all over the sky, so you do not have to worry about looking in a particular direction.”
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A meteor streams past the Milky Way in the night sky above the hill of Leeberg during the Perseid meteor shower in Grossmugl, Austria, 12 August 2018.
(REUTERS / Heinz-Peter Bader)
The meteor shower is named for the constellation Perseus, the part of the sky, or ‘radiant’ where it appears.
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A stretch of the Perseid meteor shower shoots above the Mojave Desert as seen from Nevada State Route 164, also known as the Joshua Tree Highway, about 10 miles west of Searchlight, Nev., Beginning August 13, 2018.
(Richard Brian / Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
A small chunk of an asteroid as a comet is also called a meteoroid. As it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes a meteor or fireball as a shooting star. The rocks of the rock that hit the ground, which are valuable to collectors, are meteorites.
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