Meteor Showers - Aug. 12

[GordMay]

Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Aug. 12

The Perseid meteor shower peaks on Friday morning, August 12th. No matter where you live (Northern hemisphere), the best time to look will be during the hours before local dawn when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky. While August 12th is best, the days before and after the 12th are good, too. If you get away from city lights, you could see hundreds of meteors.
The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is nowhere near Earth, the comet's wide tail does intersect Earth's orbit. We glide through it every year in July and August. Tiny bits of comet dust hit Earth's atmosphere traveling 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a tiny smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light when it disintegrates. The shower is most intense when Earth is in the dustiest part of the tail.
Perseid meteors fly out of the constellation Perseus, hence their name.

More: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/l...s/showers.html
And: http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors/

PS: What do those of you in the Southern Hemisphere see,
when you look down at the sky?

[Alan Wheeler]

Don't we see the other side of the Milkyway
The Vertigo is sheer hell.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

[delmarrey]

So that's what that was when I was up in the Straits of Georgia.

I thought it was left overs from the Aug. 6 fireworks in Vancouver.

Yeah, I know about those north west celebrations. We drove up to Seattle for New Years in 98 or 99, and ran into car trouble on the way. When we got to Seattle on New Years day, it was closed. Everyone was rrecovering from the party. The only place open was Dennys, and they were out of everything but soup.