Caoimhín's Content

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at the Perseid meteor shower and the Eta Eridanid meteor shower, along with a couple of others.

To begin with, before we move into darkness, before we move into the countryside, before we do anything else, I’m going to set the number of meteors in the Stellarium simulation to a standard Perseid rate of 110. This is the ZHR or zenith hourly rate. With a rate this high, when time is moving forward at the normal rate of 1 second per second, then there should be a couple of meteors crossing the sky each minute. We should catch one or two, but Stellarium allows for much higher rates. 110, although it’s a lot more than the amount we normally get to see, it’s still not particularly big for a meteor shower. Meteor showers can be much larger, and what would be considered a spectacular or extremely large meteor shower can be thousands of meteors an hour.

When I say thousands of meteors an hour, I really mean a ZHR of thousands, thousands of meteors from the radiant every hour. If the radiant was at the zenith, you would have the best view, but they often are not. We ignore that fact in order to get a rough idea of the ideal rate. You don’t know what part of the world a person will be observing from, or where the radiant will be for them. The amount of meteors crossing any actual zenith will be different, but it’s a rough approximation of the amount of meteors you could see. We are now through to August 8th, but there are some meteor showers whose range covers this date. The Eta Eridanids are peaking on the 7th, and we could see a maximum of 3 meteors an hour. It’s quite low in the sky, and from the city we’re likely to see 0, because they’re rather faint. For a couple of days either side, even going back to the the 6th or forward to the 8th and the 9th, there is a pretty consistent couple of meteors coming from that, so this must be a meteor shower with a reasonably broad peak.

A lot of meteor showers have a much narrower peak. The difference between the peak date and off peak time is usually much starker. The Eta Eridanids run from the 20th of July to the 17th of September, so it does have quite a long running time. Once we get a few more days towards the extreme ends of that running time, the rate will drop to zero. I have no doubt that we’ll see zero for that entire portion of July and the entire portion of September that the meteor shower is technically running through. The Piscis Austrinids are giving zero early in August, even though it runs to the 10th, we’re seeing 0 even on the 7th or 8th. The Southern Delta Aquariids run until the 23rd of August, but have dropped from their July peak of 25 ZHR to just 8. We’re still seeing a couple of meteors reasonably far from the peak, the Southern Delta Aquariids do seem to be contributing something, whereas the Alpha Capricornids, still running to the 14th, have dropped from 5 to 0. We will need to move later in the month to get some other meteor showers into the sky, like the Northern Iota Aquariids. They’re not showing a local rate at all until close to their August 21st peak. They are a variable shower, but even with the variation, it might be 5, it might be 10, not the best numbers to see either way.

Coming back to the Perseids on the 12th, these are the good ones. This is why I have the zenith hourly rate set so high, because on the 12th we could see up to 100 meteors from this meteor shower, or we would if it was radiating from the zenith. Either side of the 12th we’re still getting some pretty big numbers, into the 70’s even a day on either side. Past midnight on the 12th into the 13th, we seem to be getting a high of 89. If we move back in time a little bit, we can see that number climbing, peaking with sunset on the 12th. Unfortunately the Sun will still be quite bright a around sunset, blocking the meteors from view. Of course, we’re not going to see quite as many of them if we’re in the city anyway, even with a rate of 110. We’ll head out to the countryside, that’s what I always recommend to take a look at any meteor showers, head out to where the light pollution won’t be getting in the way. In the previous piece that we spoke about meteor showers, I mentioned that we weren’t seeing that many meteors in the sky in the attached video, even with rates set as high as 100.

Just in order to test that the meteors are working in simulation, we’re going to look at much higher rates. We’re going to go up to the much higher rate of 5,000 to start with. Even a ZHR of 5,000 isn’t that much compared to the highest ever recorded rates. We can go much higher, That’s pretty good, that’s a, that’s a big number, we’ll go a bit higher again. It is surprising to me that there’s so much room at the top of this slider, but the highest rates ever recorded are incredibly high. That’s the highest rate ever, and there we go, plenty of meteors in the sky. So the meteors are working, but do recall this is the most meteors an hour anyone’s ever seen ever, in recorded history, this is the biggest one that we’ve ever actually measured the numbers of, it is believed that rates like this have happened in the distant past, they may have happened at other times,

you really need an extraordinary rate of meteor showers for it to look the way that it’s often shown in movies and TV shows, and of course, it is important to encourage people to go and look at these things, but I think that accuracy, factual levels are a bit more appropriate. I think that people can be disappointed if they are shown hundreds and hundreds of meteor showers going through the sky, but they don’t actually get to see that many at all. Now, of course, with the slider offering such big numbers, it’s a little tricky to get it to show exactly what I want to, here we have it set to 200, an exceptional Perseid rate, an unlikely Perseid rate. Seeing 200 meters an hour, crossing the zenith is an incredible amount, but it takes quite a while. We should be seeing a couple every minute, really, we should be seeing slightly more than one a minute, slightly more than two a minute, actually, but waiting even a minute in a video like this, staring at a screen, waiting for a whole minute for a meteor to come through, I do my best to talk about things while I’m staring at the screen, but of course, it’s difficult not to be lost in the stillness and uneventfulness of what we’re seeing in the sky here,

but the Perseids, they’re coming up on the 12th, which is after the weekend, it is during the week, and we can see that the peak really is constrained there around sunset on the 12th, so even if you do, if it is more easy for you to go and take a look at the Perseids few days before, the Moon will be closer to full, which isn’t going to help, but it will be the weekend, which may make traveling into the countryside easier, you’re still going to have to wait for quite a while to see any meteors in the sky, it’s not going to look as crazy as it so often does in movies and TV shows, particularly in cartoons, but seeing an actual meteor in the real sky is quite a rewarding thing, and as long as you’re happy to spend a couple of hours outside, as long as you can keep yourself occupied, maybe having a barbecue, maybe not anything to do with fire, because of course that will damage the, your ability to see in the dark, the brighter the lights are around you, the harder it is to see the meteors in the sky, but if you have something to keep you occupied, something to do while you’re standing outside for a couple of hours waiting to catch a meteor in the sky, then that will elevate your chances and being in the countryside will elevate your chances as well.

So there are several meteor showers coming up, but the Perseids are significantly better than the other meteor showers that we see in late July and the rest of August, the Perseids are the biggest one in that couple of months. The Leonids, the Draconids, these other meteor showers that are going to come up in other times of the year, those can be quite big as well, but the Perseids in particular, they’re often quite nice, especially here in the Northern Hemisphere in August when the nights are starting to get darker, when the days are starting to get shorter, but things haven’t gotten too cold yet, that’s, that’s a nice sweet point on which to be out looking for meteors.

I hope you get to see some of the Perseid meteors during this meteor shower, I hope that you get to see any meteors while you’re out during August, whether they’re Eta Eridanids or just random meteors coming from the anti helion part of the background rate, whatever meteors they are, whatever shooting stars you see, it’s always nice to see them and I hope you do get to see them.

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