SpaceWeather.com has the scoop on a possible Perseid outburst next Wednesday morning, in the wee hours:
This year’s Perseid meteor shower could be even better than usual. “A filament of comet dust has drifted across Earth’s path and when Earth passes through it, sometime between 0800 and 0900 UT (1 – 2 am PDT) on August 12th, the Perseid meteor rate could surge to twice its normal value,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. …
The filament was shed by Perseid parent comet Swift-Tuttle in the year 1610, and this is one of Earth’s first encounters with it. “In addition,” notes Cooke, “the main Perseid debris stream, which we run into every year, may be denser than normal due to a gravitational enhancement by Saturn. The total combination of these effects could result in as many as 200 meteors per hour (ZHR).”
Unfortunately, the bright gibbous Moon will rise several hours before the expected Perseid peak, creating a glare that will overwhelm the fainter meteors. But, as SpaceWeather notes, “even a fraction of 200 is a good show.”
The big question is whether that 200-per-hour projection will prove accurate: meteor rate predictions are notoriously iffy, as Becky and I learned when, the year after the 2001 Leonid meteor storm, we traveled all the way to Joshua Tree National Park to watch an expected second consecutive “storm” in 2002, and instead saw a relatively weak shower.
Still, I might just offer to give Loyacita her wee-hours feeding next Wednesday, so that I have an opportunity to step outside between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, look up, and see what I see. I’ll just need to position myself so that the Moon is behind our house. And bundle Loyacita up, of course. Baby’s first meteor storm? 🙂