The Perseid meteor shower shows up every August, a spectacular sky-show that spurts about 100 meteors on an hourly basis. Astronomers promise this year’s event to be especially dazzling – with a predicted 200 meteors per hour – a doubled display thanks to the gravitational pull of the planet Jupiter.

Scientific “trash talk” from Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, provides a bit of backstory, “Jupiter is a real gravitational bully,” he says on the NASA website, “In our solar system there’s the sun and Jupiter and the rest is garbage.”

The meteors are a byproduct of the Swift-Tuttle comet. With a 26 kilometers-wide nucleus, it’s the largest object known to repeatedly pass by Earth. According to Space.com, it last passed during its 1992 orbit around the sun, and the next time will be in 2126. But we cross its residual debris field every year, when fragmentary dust hits earth’s atmosphere at a breath-taking 124,000 miles per hour, reaching temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 10,000 °F as they explode in fiery flashes better known as “shooting stars”.

Meteors will seem to radiate out of the constellation Perseus in the northern sky, appearing above the horizon around 10 PM in your local time, with the real show becoming visible after midnight. 

NASA explains that several times each century, when Jupiter passes Swift-Tuttle’s legacy of litter, the gaseous planet’s gravitational field bends part of the debris field a bit closer to Earth, pushing our planet into an atypically dense deluge of comet detritus. The death dance is spectacular.

Robert Massey of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society provides a snappy overview of the Perseid meteor showers in the video below:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/WimO_lDdHPk[/youtube]

North American skywatchers will see meteors dating back to the first millennium. People in the Middle East and Asia will see newer dust from the comet’s later circuits around Earth in the 15th and 19th centuries.

So slather on some bug spray, grab a blanket, and head out tonight to catch the show. NASA suggests allowing 45 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. If you live in a light-polluted area, or are experiencing inclement weather – you can still see what’s happening on the space agency’s website which is “sky-streaming” from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Mother Nature still provides the best in entertainment.

The post The Greatest Show OFF Earth? Catch this week’s Perseid meteor shower! appeared first on Green Prophet.

Because last night’s moon was the closest the cheesy orb has ever been to Earth this year.

You likely learned about moons many moons ago. It’s a cycle that looms large in Islamic religion, and serves as a natural time clock for female fertility. It goes through phases every 29.5 days moving from full to half moon to crescent to new.  And – with the same reliability as sunrises and sets – the cycle repeats.

So what’s a Super Moon? It’s an astronomical mash-up of two distinct lunar aspects. When a full moon is coincidental with the moon orbiting at its closest point to Earth, astronomers describe it as a “perigee full moon”. A perigee is the point in outer space where an object traveling around the Earth is closest to Earth’s surface, and they routinely happen whether or not the moon is full.

According to the Weather Network, lunar perigees differ depending on measured orbit, ranging from 356,400 to 370,400 kilometers from Earth.  A perigee full moon is specifically when the full moon happens closest to the minimum of that range. They typically occur every 13-14 months, but could some years have produced up to six Super Moons.

Last night’s Super Moon – at 356,896 km away, his year’s truest perigee full moon – occurred when full moon and perigee happen less than half an hour apart from one another.

It’s not always easy to gauge the size of the moon as we watch it in the sky (which is apparently one possible reason for the famous ‘moon illusion’), but being closer generally makes a perigee full moon look around 14 per cent bigger than an apogee full moon, and it gives off about 30 per cent more light as a result.

Parking Full Moon myths such as werewolves, lunatics and a jump in babies being born, what can you really expect?  It could cause higher than usual tides – not good news for people in the path of Hurricanes Julio, Halong and Genevieve.

It will reduce your star-gazing if you happen to be camping at Jordan’s Wadi Rum, Egypt’s Sharm El Sheik or Israel’s Mitzpe Ramon .

To make sure your own skies will be clear for Super Moon viewing, tune in to your local weather forecast.

Image of moon over Egypt desert from Shutterstock

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