Perseids Meteor Showers 2012: Where is The Best Viewing?

The Perseids Meteor Shower 2012 can work for you as a cheap date night, especially since it peaks in Roseville on Saturday night and into Sunday morning—if you can find a place to actually see it.

However, Roseville is close enough to the Twin Cities' urban centers for light-pollution to impede star- or meteor-gazing.

"Sorry, I gave up trying to watch  meteor showers in Roseville," said Dale Eason,  a member of the Minnesota Astronomical Society (MAS) who lives in Roseville. "Too much light pollution. Most parks in the area are also too bright but they all close at sunset and sometimes the police will patrol them and force you to leave."

Eason's advice: Leave the city and go to one of the observation sites recommended by the MAS. (See a light pollution map of Minnesota at the Minnesota Astronomical Society's web page.)

If you're willing to get behind the wheel to see a meteor, the Onan Observatory at Baylor Regional Park in Norwood Young America, MN (about an hour from Roseville), will host a viewing party. The University of Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics hosts "Universe in the Park" events this Friday and Saturday at state parks north and south of the metro area.

And the Minnesota Astronomical Society lists several other facilities in the region suitable for seeing the night sky.

More about Meteors

If the clouds cooperate (by staying away), you can see the annual meteor shower any night this week. 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.