Already on the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, where the weather allowed, it was possible to see outside the city, especially between midnight and four o’clock in the morning, on average over 50 meteors per hour, the peak of swarm activity.
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We can observe meteors for more than a month around the maximum of the swarm, but most of them fall at the time when the Earth finds itself in the densest area of the meteoroid stream, always around August 12. “After the maximum, the activity is already falling sharply,” warned astrophotographer and popularizer of astronomy Petr Horálek.
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The weather in the Czech Republic promises a spectacle
The conditions were not completely ideal the previous days, in the sky the Moon is in the phase shortly after the last quarter and on the night before the maximum it came out before midnight and disturbed by its light.
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‼ If you want to watch the Perseids during the night for tomorrow, then take a walk outside the city, the conditions will be the best there. It will spoil the Moon a bit, but on the other hand we will definitely not get wet. Numerical model ALADIN (@CHMUCHMI) promises to be clear in almost the entire territory of the Czech Republic! pic.twitter.com/uaYVSKZbbi
– OUR SPACE (@NASVESMIR) August 12, 2020
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The first night after the maximum, ie the one coming from Wednesday to Thursday, should be even better than the night before. There will be fewer meteors, but the moon will also shine less. “And the weather will offer great conditions – it will be clear, almost clear at most,” Dagmar Honsová from Meteopress told the News about the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
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Tears of St. Lawrence
The Perseid swarm shows us how the Earth passes between 17 July and 24 August in its orbit through a dust stream scattered behind the swarm’s parent comet – 109P Swift-Tuttle.
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Dust particles called meteoroids collide with the Earth and glow in the atmosphere like meteors (“shooting stars”). Because these particles are usually smaller than grains of sand and are composed of brittle cometary material, they evaporate completely as they pass through the Earth’s atmosphere.
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The name of the meteor swarm Perseid is derived from the place in the constellation from which meteors seem to fly out of perspective. The meteorides of the Perseid swarm enter the atmosphere at a speed of 59 km / s and begin to glow at an altitude of about 120 kilometers above the Earth. They fade tens of kilometers lower, in the case of larger Perseids even less than 80 km above the earth’s surface.
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“They fly into the atmosphere from one direction. Therefore, it seems to us as if their orbit originated from a single point in the sky, which is technically called a radiant. It is in the upper – northeastern half of the constellation Perseus at the time of the swarm’s maximum, “Horálek described.
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The first mention of the phenomenon comes from the middle of the 3rd century AD in connection with the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. He was one of the church dignitaries guarding property in the Roman Empire, and during the persecution of Christians, he allegedly disobeyed the order of the Roman Emperor Valerian to hand over church property and preferred to distribute it to the poor. A few days after his execution on August 10, 258, glittering tears were to fall from the night sky – since then, the Perseids have been popularly known as the “tears of St. Lawrence.”
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Perseids – scheme of the night sky
Photo: Astronomical Institute of the ASCR
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) proved that this was an astronomical phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century. He was the first to find a direct connection between meteors and comets and also determined that Perseid originated in dust from the periodic comet 109P Swift-Tuttle, discovered by two American astronomers in 1862. The comet with a period of 134 years last appeared in the Sun in 1992. will approach him only in 2126.
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