Perseids Meteor Shower 2012: Peak Time and Place to Watch in the Twin Cities

The Perseids Meteor Shower 2012 can work for you as a cheap date night, especially since it peaks in Burnsville this weekend.

According to Astronomy.com, the Perseids Meteor shower will be most spectacular on Saturday night with roughly 80 "shooting stars" per hour. It also occurs on a night when the moon is in its waning crescent phase, which means the moonlight won't interfere with your view of the dashing meteors. If the clouds cooperate you're in for a spectacular show.

The meteor shower is annual event. Space.com tells us these objects are tiny bits of rock and debris from an old comet, which is named Swift-Tuttle after the astronomers who discovered it in 1862. The shower splashes through the sky every year in early August when Earth passes through the comet Swift-Tuttle's orbit and sweeps up some of this debris. We see shooting stars—rapid streaks of light—as the tiny rocks encounter the thin upper atmosphere of the Earth and the air is heated to incandescence.

For the geeks among us, here's some trivia: The Perseids get their name from Perseus, the constellation from which they seem to emanate, but they can appear anywhere in the sky. Their only connection with Perseus is that, if you trace their path backward across the sky, eventually you get to Perseus.

You can see the shower anywhere in the sky, but look toward the southeastern sky to see the meteors at their brightest and longest.

This bit of advice from Space.com

If you don't see any meteors at first, be patient. This is a meteor shower, not a meteor storm. There will be a lot more meteors than you would see on a normal night, but they will still only come at random intervals, perhaps 20 or 30 in an hour.

When you do see a meteor, it will likely be very fast and at the edge of your field of vision. You may even doubt that what you saw was real. But, when you do see something, watch that area more closely, as two or three meteors often come in groups down the same track.

The meteor shower will be visible to the naked eye, so you won't even need a telescope. Just spread out a blanket, maybe a late-night picnic, lay back and enjoy. 

But if you want to see it from an actual observatory, head over to the Onan Observatory at Baylor Regional Park, just west of the Twin Cities. The observatory is free to visit, but a parking pass is required to enter the park.

Perseid Meteor Trivia:

• These meteors travel 37 miles per second!
• The best time to view will be 2 a.m. on Sunday.
• The weather in Montclair, so far, is predicted to be clear, so you should have a good view.
• The Perseid Meteors are cast-offs of the Swift-Tuttle comet, according to Space.com.
• The shower began July 23, and will peak on Saturday night. 
• Look toward the Perseus constellation, which forms an inverted "Y" shape and is in the northeast.
• Some of the meteroids are as small as a grain of sand, but they have the kinetic energy of a nuclear bomb!
• If you see a very slow, bright object sailing across the sky, it's either a satellite or a Space Station.   

If you snap a photo, e-mail it to Burnsville Editor Clare Kennedy at clare.kennedy@patch.com or upload it to the Patch Pics and Clips page.