Here come the Perseids

A comet, because I couldn’t find any decent pictures of meteors. Photo by Foreversouls.

Tonight is an excellent night to look for shooting stars.

I used to look for them regularly around this time of year as I was digging in a forest in Luxembourg. A short walk away was a field and in the dry summer it was possible to take a sleeping bag out and gaze into space looking for meteors. Or rather, because I was one of the people who worked during the day, fall asleep. Meteors are a hard thing to track in the historical record. They’re caused by the earth passing through the debris of a comet’s orbit. As a comet travels round the sun it lays down a track of dust. We hit these particles and they flash in the sky when they hit the atmosphere. This makes them an annual event. The shower that peaks tonight are known as the Perseids, as they appear to be shooting out of the constellation of Perseus. We been passing through this patch for a few days, but the peak density is tonight, and more or less the early hours of August 12th every year. This should make them predictable. Wouldn’t it be a big help to shamanic power if you knew when the sky was due to fall?

Unfortunately while we know from historical records that there were meteor showers in the past, we cannot be sure when they were. The dust clouds move with the orbits of the comets and so they come into and move out of focus. We can only track some meteor showers back a thousand years, which may sound like a long time, but it’s less than halfway back to the classical period. The Perseids are different, they were almost certainly around during the days of the Roman Empire at least. There’s no record of them from the classical world, but there were reports of them in AD 36 from China.

The best way to see them is to take a sleeping back and find somewhere with no nearby lights to shine in your eyes. Then simply gaze upwards and wait for the light show. There should be more meteors visible after midnight local time, which would be 1am if you’re in a country which has daylight saving time. If you’re eagle-eyed you should see around 60 falling stars an hour, so make sure you have plenty of wishes. —–