While the forecast is for mostly cloudy skies across Iowa, dedicated stargazers will still be hoping to spot some bright streaks in the sky as the Perseid meteor shower peaks this evening.
Dustin Swarm, a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, says the best viewing should be between 11 o’clock tonight and 4 tomorrow morning.
Swarm says, “The Perseids are called the Perseid meteor shower because they appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, which would be in the northeast part of the sky for us.”
If the skies clear, we should be able to see roughly one or two meteors every minute, or 50 to 100 every hour. Plus, viewing conditions should be exceptional due to a dark new moon.
This meteor shower is active from July 17th through August 24th, so if you don’t see the sky show this evening, try again soon.
“Even though peak is tonight, the following couple nights will still have good viewing,” Swarm says, “so any chance you get through the rest of this month, go ahead and go out, find a dark spot and look to the northeast to see if you can spot any meteors.”
Some backyard astronomers spend thousands of dollars on their sophisticated equipment for viewing the heavens, but Swarm says Iowans won’t need anything special to spot these meteors.
“You want a really wide field of view because even though the meteors radiate from a particular point in the sky, they can really appear at -any- point in the sky,” he says. “They just seem to point back toward a particular location, so you want to have a wide field of view and that means no binoculars, no telescopes.”
This is an annual event as the Earth’s orbit crosses through a debris field left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle.
