© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
One of the brightest meteor showers that happen every year, the Perseids, is set to peak on August 13 and August 14. During the peak, you might see up to 100 meteors per hour. Here is how the cosmic wonder happens and how you can catch a glimpse of it.
The Perseid meteor shower started on July 17 and will end on August 24 but the peak is happening this week on Sunday and Monday, according to Time and Date. You will not need any special equipment like a telescope or even any special skills to watch it. But you will need a clear sky.
The Perseids seem to emerge from the Perseus constellation, which is where it gets its name from. To watch it, find a place far away from the city lights and all the light pollution. If you are not sure about such a location near where you live, look at an interactive light pollution map. You can go to lightpollutionmap.info or darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html.
Once you are on the map, zoom into your location and look for places with low light pollution. Then, use Google Maps to figure out which would be the most convenient for you to travel to.
After doing all that, once you reach a relatively dark location, find a comfortable place to sit down and view the meteors or maybe even lie down. You can use an AR sky mapping app like PhotoPills to look for the “radian” of the meteor shower. The radian is the location from which the meteors seem to originate. The higher the radian is in the sky, the higher the number of meteors you will be able to spot.
Meteor showers happen when the debris left behind by comets or asteroids burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. The Perseids are caused by the space debris from Swift-Tuttle Comet. The Perseid meteor shower is one of the favourites for skywatchers because you might be able to see between 60 to 100 meteors in an hour at its peak.
But in case you cannot do all of that, don’t worry. You can also watch the meteor shower through the live stream hosted by the Virtual Telescope project above.
