Viewing conditions ideal for this year’s Perseids showers

By Stefanos Messios

The annual Perseids showers will reach their peak on Thursday and viewing conditions are expected to be under ideal conditions, according to astronomers.

According to a post by Phedias Hadjicharalambous on behalf of the Cyprus Astronomy Organisation on Facebook, the climax of the showers can be viewed on Thursday night.

“You can easily see one of these shooting stars with the naked eye, just by looking straight up at the sky. As with most of these events, the best viewing experience is in the hours before dawn. That is when most of them are carried away from the side of the Earth which moves towards their current, which corresponds to local hours between midnight and dawn,” his post read.

“Despite many of these stars arriving between dawn and noon, they are not visible during this time due to sunlight,” he added.

It is mentioned that some of them can even be seen before midnight, often creating fiery orbits as they pass through the atmosphere, leaving large traces of light.

“In order to witness the most visible meteors burning as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s best to leave the cities, as to avoid the areas with light pollution, and to find the widest possible field of view without obstructing buildings. The darker the place where the viewing is taking place, the more impressive the visual result will be,” noted Hadjicharalambous.

As they explained in the post, the reason why it is believed that this year is going to have such ideal viewing conditions for the meteor shower compared to last year is because the moon, which makes it much more difficult to see these sorts of events, will be below the horizon relatively early.

The evenings of August 11 and 12, the apex of the meteor showers begins at 11pm and will last until 4am in most areas, during this time there will be more ‘Perseids’ meteors visible than at any other time:  one per minute, 60 per hour.

Annually, starting from mid-July, Earth starts to pass through the stream of the remnants of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which is made up of space particles/debris and spans more than 15 million kilometres. Crossing our solar system and approaching Earth every 133 years, this comet is the source of perhaps the most remarkable meteor shower on Earth: The ‘Perseids’.

The reason this particular shower is called ‘Perseids’ is because the point from which it appears to hail from, which is called the ‘radiant’, lies in the constellation Perseus.

The ‘Perseids’ meteors are small pieces of interplanetary material that come from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. When they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the friction they encounter causes the material to burn and break apart within seconds while travelling at enormous speeds.

Sometimes, you get an amount of this material that is big enough to withstand this fiction and reach the Earth’s surface before it fully breaks apart. These are called ‘meteorites. The brightest of these shooting starts that almost seem to tear the night sky apart are called ‘fireballs’.