The Perseid meteor shower

During its year-long orbit around the sun, Planet Earth encounters dust streams left in it’s path by comets that are inbound or outbound on their own highly elliptical orbits around the sun. Every August, Earth passes through a stream of dust left behind Comet Swift-Tuttle which last passed this way in 1996 and won’t return until 2126. Dust particles from the comet crash into the earth’s atmosphere where they burn brightly and become what we know as the annual Perseid meteor shower.

This years meteor shower activity peaked on 13 August. My camera detected over 300 Perseid meteors on the night of 12-13 August. If the moon hadn’t been nearly full that night, and had there been fewer clouds, many more would have been detected.

Figure 1 is a composite image of all the meteors (and a few aircraft) that passed by my camera that night.

 

Figure 2 is a map of the sky that shows where the meteors originated.

 

You can view a timelapse video of the night’s events here. In this video, you’ll see the short and brief flashes of the meteors among the longer and slower passage of aircraft and satellites, passing clouds and the glare of the moon.