The best time to spot the annual Perseid meteor shower is this week, when the number of particles hitting the atmosphere is at its peak.
Perseid shower is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle and has been observed for 2000 years. It normally peaks at 100 or more meteors per hour in the absence of moonlight on new moon.
This year because the peak is scheduled for late Friday night into early Saturday morning ? the same night as a full moon ? the view will be hampered. With the bright moonlight that will flood the sky, the meteors will be visible at only 20 to 30 per hour at most at peak on those days.
"The Perseids are considered the best meteor shower of the year by many, but with the full moon washing out all but the brightest meteors, rates will probably only be 20-30 per hour at most," according to NASA.
According to Space.com, you can kick back between 2:59 a.m. and 4:31 a.m. on Aug. 10. And on Aug. 11, when the window of opportunity shrinks, you will need to be looking out between 4:02 a.m. and 4:32 a.m.
The best view will be in the northern hemisphere.
Meteors (L, top and bottom, red) streak past stars in the night sky near Amman, in the early hours of August 12, 2005. The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. Perseid meteor are bright, and often leave luminous trails of gas. The meteor was clearly visible to the naked eye in several parts of the Middle East.REUTERS/Ali Jarekji PP05080130Stargazers and astronomers are getting ready for one of the biggest meteor event of all times as the annual Perseid meteor shower will coincide with the Delta Aquarid meteor shower causing a magnificent cosmic traffic jam.Reuters.A meteor streaks past stars in the night sky over Stonehenge in Salisbury Plain, southern England August 12, 2010. The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle.Reuters.The Perseid shower takes place as the Earth moves through the stream of debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. In 2010 the peak was predicted to take place between 12–13 August 2010. Despite the Perseids being best visible in the northern hemisphere, due to the path of Comet Swift-Tuttle's orbit, the shower was also spotted from the exceptionally dark skies over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. In order not to miss any meteors in the display, ESO Photo Ambassador Stéphane Guisard set up 3 cameras to take continuous time-lapse pictures on the platform of the Very Large Telescope during the nights of 12–13 and 13–14 August 2010. This handpicked photograph, from the night of 13–14 August, was one of Guisard’s 8000 individual exposures and shows one of the brightest meteors captured. The scene is lit by the reddened light of the setting Moon outside the left of the frame.Reuters.Perseid Power
Enjoying the bright Moon's absence from early morning skies, observers around the world reported lovely displays during this year's Perseid meteor shower, which peaked August 11 and 12. This bright and colorful fireball meteor flashed through skies over Japan in the early morning hours of August 12. Ending at the upper right, the meteor's trail points down and to the left, back to the shower's radiant point between the constellations of Perseus and Cassiopeia, seen here just above the tower structure in the foreground. The Pleiades star cluster is also visible well below the meteor's trail.Perseid shower meteors can be traced to particles of dust from the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle. The comet dust impacts the atmosphere at speeds of around 60 kilometers per second.Katsuhiro Mouri & Shuji Kobaya
