For the past two days, the meteors have been visible to viewers, and they will have an even better view during the peak event on Friday night. “Meteors are these tiny little bits of space dust that fall to earth and burn up, and when that happens we see them in the sky as a falling star or shooting star,” says Scott Young, the Planetarium astronomer at the Manitoba Museum. . “Meteor is kind of the official name for these objects, and on any given night you can see one or two of them if you’re lucky, but on certain nights of the year, the Earth goes through a big cloud of cosmic dust. And when you hit all that dust the Earth in the same night, you get a lot of meteors. That’s what we call a meteor shower.” Young also says it won’t look like thousands of stars are falling from the sky, but rather one star every minute instead of one a night. “It always happens every year around August 11-13, somewhere in that range because we’re going through the dust bunny left behind by a comet crossing Earth’s orbit. Now, that doesn’t always mean you’re going to see all these things that they hit the Earth and the timing can happen during the day for you. It can be cloudy or like this year, near the full moon. When the full moon is up, it’s hard to see some of these fainter meteors that you would see.” . The best time to see any meteor shower is between midnight and dawn. According to Young, even with the bright light of a full moon on the same night as peak meteor viewing time, it’s a heavy enough shower that viewers will be able to see shooting stars. “The official peak is after midnight on Friday night, so Saturday morning around 3:00am our time. But to be honest, it’s not an overnight event. It builds up over the previous two weeks and every night there will be more and more meteor showers until the peak and then after the peak, it disappears for a few weeks.” The comet causing the meteor shower is Comet Swift–Tuttle, discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle in 1862. “Each meteor shower during the year has its own source objects, most of them are comets, and we know that when we get close to the comet’s orbit in our orbit, we will see this meteor shower. They are actually named after the constellations in the sky where the meteors appear to come from. When we look at the sky, it looks like the meteors from the Perseid meteor shower will come from the constellation Perseus, which rises in the northeastern part of the sky at this time of of time. That doesn’t mean you have to know where Perseus is, meteors can appear all over the sky.” To get the best view of the top of the meteor shower, Young suggests viewers go to a place where there aren’t many lights and even “put your back to any bright lights that are like the moon or city lights “. He also suggests putting the phone away, because the bright light will cause your eyes to take time to adjust to the dark sky, and some of the fainter flying stars may be missed. “This is one of those things where you have to unplug, disconnect and just lie under the stars, relax and look up. It’s a great therapeutic way to connect with the sky.” Normally on the peak day of the event, Young will go out with an all-sky camera and stream live on the Manitoba Museum’s Facebook and YouTube pages, but he says it always depends on the weather.
