Scores of Orange County residents this weekend will be staying up late--staring transfixed into space.
The occasion is the annual sky spectacle called the Perseid Meteor Shower. Rapid streaks of light--popularly but incorrectly called "shooting stars"--will be flashing across the evening skies tonight and will continue through early Tuesday morning.
"It's a beautiful sight," said Patrick So, an astronomy lecturer at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "It's definitely worth watching."
More meteors can be seen with the naked eye this weekend than at any other time of the year, and this year's show will even be better than usual because the crescent moon this weekend sets early in the evening. That makes the sky darker and the meteor shower more visible.
"This is a meteor shower that gets its name because it appears to come from the constellation Perseus," said Robert M. Gill, a physicist and administrator at Cal State Fullerton. "Actually, the Earth is moving through a cloud of material (in outer space)--the remnant of a comet. The small particles left by the comet burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, causing a kind of flash. Typically these particles that burn up are as small as a grain of sand."
Gill, a past president of the Orange County Astronomers, said scores of members of that private club will be out watching the skies this weekend. "The meteor showers are very spectacular," he said.
According to Astronomy magazine, the best views of the meteors are after midnight each night this weekend. The magazine predicts that the peak meteor action will take place midnight Monday night and continue into early Tuesday morning. The magazine said viewers in rural areas can see up to 80 meteors an hour shortly after midnight Monday.
Every year around Aug. 12, the Earth passes through the trail of dusty debris left in the heavens by the ancient comet Swift-Tuttle. As the dust from that old comet passes into the Earth's atmosphere, it ignites into a fiery burn. Simultaneously, the air around the cosmic particles becomes ionized during the particles' rapid fall. The streaks of light in the skies are a combination of the glowing, ionized air channels and the fiery particles hurtling to Earth.
All combine for a fantastic show.
"It's a spectacle," Gill said. "It's one of the wonders of the universe. I personally find watching the meteor showers very relaxing and very soothing."
