See a meteor tonight !!!
Perseid meteor shower is on display right now ! Even if you don’t see a lot of meteors – assuming your skies are clear-ish – you’ll see a spectacularly bright planet Jupiter in the South – with a somewhat less bright planet Saturn about 10 degrees to the right of it ( for scale, a full Moon is about half a degree across. ) Happily the Moon isn’t around for long tonight – it’s only just past it’s New phase, so it sets quite quickly – leaving us relatively dark skies for our Perseid shower observations.
Good Luck !!
Brian May: Meteor shower on display
– https://youtu.be/bI5tNanUmfw
TRANSCRIPT: Jen Tunney
E&OE
Hi Folks
I’m outside of my roof tonight for a very good reason because this is the peak time of the Perseid Meteor shower and I’m looking for meteors and if I’m lucky I’m going to see one on average about one every minute, but it’s very patchy. Sometimes you don’t see any for a long time. I just saw one over there which is very nice. It’s pretty dark up here and I want it to stay that way because I want my dark adaption to be good. Your eyes take quite a while to adapt to the dark and actually see what’s going on.
I’m in London which is a grave disadvantage because the skies in London are so badly polluted by light – stray light from the city. It’s very hard to see anything but you can see a few of these meteors because they’re quite bright. So if you’ve got clear skies and you’re up, and I can only tell you about the UK, but you should be able to see them from anywhere, certainly in the Northern hemisphere about this time of night. And yeah, you can look towards the East and you can look towards if you know where Perseus is – it’s rising in the North-east. That’s where the meteors appear to come from. That’s called the radiant and they they do appear to radiate from there, but actually you can look anywhere around the sky and you’re just as likely to see one because they hit the Earth’s atmosphere completely randomly. distributed along the path of a Comet,because Comets shed dust the whole time.
This particular Comet is called Swift-Tuttle, and we’re lucky enough to go through this trail of dust at exactly this time every year. It’s called the Perseid Meteor Shower. So if you’ve got nothing to do, go up on your roof or go some place where it’s darkish and best thing is just lay on your back for a while on something soft and just relax and look around hopefully you’ll see a couple of meteors. Let me know if you do, okay? Good luck.
i remember doing this with Patrick – dear Patrick Moore – years ago. We used to go down to his garden in Selsey where the sky is pretty good, dark – and we used to see a lot of lovely meteors there. Thems were good times. We miss you Patrick, but it’s thanks to you that we know about all this stuff and we can share it. So grab yourself a meteor shower tonight, okay?
Good luck folks.
Bri
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Folks ! Check out the new episode of “Queen The Greatest” on YouTube. This week, it features Queen songs written by me. So obviously the beat episode so far ! Enjoy !
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Well, glad some of you got to see a Perseid meteor or two last night. Some of you saw loads ! Wonderful ! This amazing time exposure by Jamie Cooper shows ALL the meteors visible last night as captured by his static wide angle camera attached to his house.
He’s part of a nationwide (actually worldwide) meteor monitoring project, which correlated data from many such cameras in different locations. From this they can calculate the exact height, speed and trajectory of each of those trails. They can even calculate the orbit of that tiny pebble – revealing its entire journey before it met its end burning up in our atmosphere.
Bri