Ready to set your alarm?
The annual Perseid meteor shower, which NASA has called the best meteor shower of the year — and which inspired John Denver to write “Rocky Mountain High” more than 50 years ago — is underway now. It’s expected to peak Tuesday night into early Wednesday morning.
The astronomical show often generates as many as 50 to 75 shooting stars per hour over California and much of the United States. This year, however, the view will be limited by a nearly-full moon on the peak night.
“You’ll still be able to see meteors,” said Ben Burress, staff astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland Hills. “You might miss some of the fainter meteors, but the moon is not going to overpower the major meteors of the shower. It’s nice to have a very dark sky. But if your goal is to see a meteor, this is a good time, moon or no moon.”
The “shooting stars” that zip across the night sky during the Perseid shower aren’t really stars. They are space pebbles.
The meteor shower occurs every year between mid-July and mid-August when Earth, as it orbits around the sun, crosses a trail of dust and dirt from the famous Swift-Tuttle comet, which itself orbits the sun once every 133 years. The comet is just a huge ball of ice, with rocks, dust and other debris inside it. With each pass around the sun, some of that debris breaks away, and is left behind in the comet’s wake, creating a giant oval that extends from beyond Pluto to around the sun.
As Earth passes through that debris field each year, some of those tiny bits of sand, metal and rock burn up when they come into Earth’s atmosphere, creating the flashing trails we see across the night sky.
“It’s like a car driving into a cloud of insects,” Burress said.
The best time to see the Perseid meteor shower this year will be early in the morning Wednesday, a few hours before the sun rises at 6:23 a.m., said Andrew Fraknoi, chairman emeritus of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College.
You can look for them anywhere in the sky. But the view is best out in the country.
“Get away from city lights and find a location that’s relatively dark,” Fraknoi said.
Be patient, he advised. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. And don’t use a telescope or binoculars — they restrict your view and it’s important to see the whole sky to have the best chance at seeing shooting stars.
If you can drive to a dark rural location, like a road or park in the hills around the Bay Area away from city lights and fog, you’ll have a better chance of seeing more meteors.
Chabot Space & Science Center will open its observation deck to the public for a watch party from 11 p.m. Tuesday until 3 a.m. Wednesday, with experts on hand to explain the show. Cost of admission is $15 for adults and $7 for kids.
The Perseid meteor shower was first documented by Chinese astronomers in 36 A.D.
Apart from inspiring people about nature and space for hundreds of generations, the Perseids also inspired a famous song. In 1971, singer John Denver and several friends took a camping trip to Williams Lake, near Aspen, Colorado, to watch the Perseids. Denver, then 27, was so moved he wrote “Rocky Mountain High,” which became a smash hit for lyrics like “I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky” and “shadow from the starlight is softer than a lullaby.”
“Imagine a moonless night in the Rockies in the dead of summer and you have it,” he wrote later in his autobiography. “I had insisted to everybody that it was going to be a glorious display.”
Denver died in 1997 after a light plane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay. Ten years later, state legislators named his Perseid-inspired ballad one of Colorado’s two official state songs.
“Even though this kind of event requires you to get up early or stay up late, people are never disappointed,” Burress said. “It’s a good reminder to slow down and smell the roses and decouple from our busy lives and take a moment to observe nature. This is an opportunity to observe something special.”
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