Thursday, August 9, 2007

UTA reminds community of annual perseid meteor shower coming up this weekend

By Pegasus News wire

ARLINGTON—Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…a shooting star!

A shooting star, or a meteor, is a flash of light in the sky caused by the burning of a piece of space dust in Earth’s atmosphere. On an average night, you might see a few meteors per hour as random bits come rushing down to Earth. Friction between the tiny particles and the Earth’s air molecules heats the air around the particle and causes it to burn up before reaching the ground. Meteors can happen at any time of the year, but certain times of the year are better for viewing these celestial fireworks. These are the nights of “meteor showers.”

Orbiting around the Sun are chunks of “dirty ice” called comets. As they get close to the Sun, some of the ice and dust gets melted off the comet; then pressure from sunlight causes the debris to fan out in a long tail. After the comet retreats to the outer Solar System, the debris continues on in the original orbit. If the debris’ orbit intersects with the Earth’s orbit, then the Earth will always pass through a concentrated dust field on the same nights each year.

The annual Perseid Meteor Shower peaks on the nights of August 11 – 13. As a bonus this year, the Moon is near its new phase, so moonlight won’t interfere with the show. In a dark sky, viewers may see one meteor per minute during the peak of the shower.

No special equipment is required to watch the shower, just a comfortable reclining chair and some bug spray. The best time to see the meteors will be after midnight, but if you can’t stay up that late you should be rewarded for viewing at any hour of the night. Find a location as far from city lights as possible (the light pollution drowns out the dimmer meteors). Let your gaze take in as much of the sky as possible – meteors can be in any part of the sky. Tracing the lines of the meteors back, though, shows them to appear to originate from the constellation Perseus.

For more information, contact Planetarium Director Marc Rouleau at The University of Texas at Arlington, (817) 272-0822.

Source: UTA

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