DETROIT – With all of the eclipse hype, it's easy to forget about this celestial gem.
The annual Perseid Meteor Shower is set to light up the sky this weekend, pending weather of course. Here's what you need to know:
When is the Perseid Meteor Shower?
The meteor shower will peak at around 1 p.m. EDT on Aug. 12, which makes the night before and the night after the best times to see it.
NASA Meteor expert Bill Cooke told Space.com that it might not be the best year to watch them because of the moonlight.
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"Rates will be about half what they would be normally, because of the bright moonlight," Cooke told Space.com. "Instead of 80 to 100, [there will be] 40 to 50 per hour. And that's just because the moon's going to wash out the fainter ones."
"But the good news is that the Perseids are rich in fireballs; otherwise the moon would really mess with them," Cooke added.
Where can I see them in Metro Detroit?
Well, it's not impossible to see them if you're in Detroit, but your best chance is to head out to the suburbs.
Here's more from Space.com: The key to seeing a meteor shower is "to take in as much sky as possible," Cooke said. Go to a dark area, in the suburbs or countryside, and prepare to sit outside for a few hours. It takes about 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark, and the longer you wait outside, the more you'll see. A rate of 150 meteors per hour, for instance, means two to three meteors per minute, including faint streaks along with bright, fireball-generating ones.
So what are meteors?
Actually, they are technically called meteoroids. Surprisingly, most meteoroids are little pieces of rock from space that are about as big as a single grape nuts cereal nugget! They hit our atmosphere fifty to seventy-five miles up at an astounding 25,000 to 160,000 mph (evening meteoroids tend to be slower than ones that arrive in the late night hours).
When the meteoroid collides with air molecules, its high level of kinetic energy rapidly ionizes and excites a long, thin column of atmospheric atoms along the meteoroid's path, creating a flash of light visible from the ground below. This column, or meteor trail, is usually less than a yard in diameter, but will be tens of miles long.
Annual meteor showers like the Perseids occur because the earth passes through the stream of debris leftover when comets flew by a long time ago (the debris trail that we're passing through now is from Comet Swift-Tuttle).