Today’s the day for Perseid-max, the peak time for the annual Perseid meteor shower that we see as a splendid ‘shooting stars’ display: brief streaks of light in the sky as cosmic particles burn up in the upper atmosphere. These particular ones are so-named because they appear to come from the part of the heavens occupied by the constellation Perseus.
The Perseids should be visible in the pre-dawn and evening skies, and usually peak at a rate of around one or two a minute. They appear every August with such regularity because they are a part of a meteor stream, a vast quantity of dust and rock particles orbiting the Sun. They are the broken remains of an ancient comet that we pass through as the orbits of the stream and the Earth intersect once a year.
Sky map courtesy StarDate Online
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