It Has Begun! Look Up For The Perseid Meteor Shower of August 2022

One of the year's best meteor showers is going to peak in the coming days, ending the shooting star drought. The Perseids will be active from July 17th to August 24th, reaching their peak around the 11th and 12th of August. In this video, I'll explain everything you need to know about a meteor shower and how to see the upcoming celestial show of the Perseids. A meteor shower is an astronomical event where several meteors appear in the sky. Meteor showers occur when Earth comes in the path of the debris stream from a comet or an asteroid. Each time one swings by the Sun in its orbit, some of its ice vaporizes, and a certain amount of meteoroids will be shed. The meteoroids spread out along the entire orbit of the object to form a meteoroid stream, also known as a dust trail. This dust trail follows the orbit of the parent comet or asteroid. When Earth passes through the orbit of this dust trail, these particles interact with the atmosphere, and what we see is a spectacular show of meteors. A meteor shower. The parent body associated with the Perseids is named Comet Swift-Tuttle. This comet has a highly eccentric orbit. Its orbit takes it outside Pluto at the farthest distance and inside that of Earth at the nearest. Swift-Tuttle takes 133 years to orbit the Sun. Every time this comet passes through the inner solar system, the Sun warms and softens up the ice in the comet, causing it to release fresh comet material into its orbital stream. Meteor showers have a unique point called radiant associated with them. It's the point from where the meteors appear to originate. Therefore, a shower produces its best displays when the radiant is well up in the night sky. The Perseids radiant is in the Perseus constellation as shown. You may download one of the space apps given in the description to find the radiant according to your location quickly. Perseids can produce up to 150 meteors per hour under perfectly dark skies. It's one of the year's best meteor showers, along with the Quadrantids of January and Geminids of December. The ideal time to look for meteors is in the pre-dawn hours. The meteors will peak between August 11th and 12th. The peak viewing days are typically your best shot to see the sky speckled with bright meteors. To see the shooting stars, look up and to the north. Those in southern latitudes can look toward the northeast to see more meteors. There's no need for any telescope or binoculars to see meteors across the sky. However, you must give your eyes at least 30 minutes to adapt to the darkness. Also, you don't have to stare at the radiant to see the meteors. They can appear anywhere in the sky, but all of them will seem to originate from the radiant point. Sky watchers looking out for the Perseids might also be treated to some stray meteors from the southern delta aquarid meteor shower, which peaks in late July. Though the southern delta aquarids are best viewed from the southern hemisphere, they can sometimes be visible to those in mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere. The Perseid meteor shower will peak close to the full moon this year, so the moonlight will present significant interference to the show. But given the intensity of the Perseids, you can still catch the bright meteors across the sky. A couple of days after the Perseids peak, another celestial event will delight the sky gazers. The opposition of Saturn on August 14th. A superior planet's opposition is a configuration in which the planet aligns with the Sun and the Earth as shown. Around opposition, the planet lies opposite the Sun, so it rises in the east at sunset, reaches its highest point in the sky around midnight, and sets at dawn. It's the best time to see Saturn and photograph the ringed world. Around the same time, the planet will make its closest approach to Earth, lying about 65 million kilometers closer than average.