Perseid Meteor Shower at its best this weekend! Catch the light show, know when and where
Have you ever witnessed a meteor shower? Well, you can witness one now, and that too the best one of them all! Called the Perseid meteor shower. It will be at its brightest on August 12. According to NASA, a meteor is a space rock that comes into Earth's atmosphere. As it falls, the air makes it really hot because of the friction. The bright streak we see is not the rock itself, but the hot air around it. When many space rocks hit the atmosphere over Earth together, we call it a meteor shower. These meteors are small, fast and bright, leaving trails of light and color behind them as they move through the Earth's atmosphere and get burned up.
The Perseid Meteor Shower will be at its liveliest on the night of August 12 when the Earth goes through the dusty remains left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet. The Perseid meteor shower is often thought of as the best one of them all as it has the most shooting stars and the weather is usually nice in late summer to make for ideal viewing.
Unlike last year, when the full moon made it hard to see the meteors, this year the moon will be a smaller crescent shape, so even the fainter shooting stars will be visible. You can see around 50 to 100 meteors every hour.
According to Bill Cooke, who leads NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, People in the U.S. can reasonably expect to see around 40 Perseids in the hour just before dawn on peak nights. That's about one every couple of minutes, which is not bad. “However, we are assuming you are out in the country, well away from cities and suburbs,” he added. The brighter skies of suburban areas greatly reduce the rates, with 10 or fewer expected in an hour.
For the best view of the Perseid meteor shower, you can head to the Northern Hemisphere. To
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