New York Weather News - Jeff's Weather Blog

This weekend you may have a chance to see The Perseid meteor shower, an annual celestial event beloved by millions of skywatchers around the world. But moonlight will interfere somewhat with the view.

Sky & Telescope magazine predicts that the Perseid shower will reach its peak late on Friday and Saturday nights, August 11-12 and 12-13 (for viewers in North America). The rate of activity should pick up after midnight until the first light of dawn.

You'll need no equipment but your eyes. The moonlight in the sky will hide the fainter meteors, and so will artificial light pollution, but the brightest meteors should still show through.

Perseids can appear anywhere and everywhere in the sky
If you trace each meteor's direction of flight backward far enough across the sky, you'll find that this imaginary line crosses a spot in the constellation Perseus, near Cassiopeia. This is the shower's radiant, the perspective point from which all the Perseids would appear to come if you could see them approaching from the far distance. The radiant is low in the north-northeast before midnight and rises higher in the northeast during the early-morning hours.

For several years in the early 1990s the Perseids performed spectacularly, flaring with outbursts of up to hundreds of meteors visible per hour. The rubble streams responsible for these outbursts were probably shed during Comet Swift-Tuttle's swing by the Sun in 1862. In recent years, though, the shower has returned to normal.