Perseid Meteor Shower peaks TONIGHT with up to 150 fireballs shooting overhead every hour – here's the best time to catch the stunning celestial display
This evening, the Perseid Meteor Shower will reach its stunning peak - and you won't want to miss it.
At the peak, sharp-eyed observers will be able to spot up to 150 shooting stars every hour.
And with the Met Office forecasting clear skies and warm weather for most of the UK, this could be the perfect chance to spot the year's most popular meteor shower.
Although the light from the recent full Sturgeon Moon might make it harder to see some of the fainter trails, you should get a great view from anywhere in the UK.
And the good news is that you don't even need any special equipment to see them.
All you'll need is a nice dark location, somewhere comfortable to sit or lie down, and a little bit of patience.
So, here's how you can get the best possible view of tonight's celestial display.
How to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower
Even though the Perseid Meteor Shower can be spectacular, some of the smaller meteors can still be relatively faint or hard to see.
Dr Shyam Balaji, of King's College London, told Daily Mail: 'Find a dark location far from streetlights or urban glare, the countryside or a park with an open view of the sky works best.'
It's also very important to let your eyes fully adjust to the darkness so that you can make out even the faintest stars.
Dr Balaji says that means at least 20 to 30 minutes not using a torch or looking at your phone, which will ruin your night vision.
Since it is summertime, this means you'll need to wait until at least 10:00pm for the sky to be dark enough to see anything.
Meteor showers tend to become more impressive towards midnight when the sky is darkest, so be prepared for a late night if you want the best view.
Then, once you are comfortable and accustomed to the darkness, all you need to do is look up and be patient.
Where do meteors come from?
Meteors come from leftover comet particles and bits from broken asteroids.
When comets come around the sun, they leave a dusty trail behind them.
Every year, Earth passes through these debris trails, letting the bits collide with our atmosphere and disintegrate, creating fiery streaks in the sky.
Source: NASA
The Perseid Meteor Shower gets its name from the constellation Perseus, from which the shooting stars appear to emerge.
This will be the best place to spot shooting stars, and can be found by looking northeast and high in the sky.
If you're having trouble finding it, look for the bright 'W' or 'M' of stars which form the nearby Cassiopeia constellation or use a stargazing app to help.
'While you can look at the whole sky and are likely to see a meteor, that's the target location in order to get the best viewing experience,' says Dr Balaji.
Since the Perseid meteors are so fast, there's no point trying to use a telescope or binoculars to see anything, and you are better off observing with the naked eye.
The good news is that the Met Office currently forecasts clear skies for most of the country from midnight onwards.
Tom Morgan, operational meteorologist at the Met Office, told Daily Mail that tomorrow will bring clearer skies with 'Wales, central England and northern England having the most prolonged clear periods during the evening, but some clear periods likely in many parts of the UK at times and into the early hours of Wednesday morning.'
Although we don't know exactly when the Perseids started, the first sightings date back nearly 2,000 years to early records from ancient China.
Like all meteors, the shooting stars of the Perseid Meteor Shower are caused by tiny pieces of dust and rock slamming into the atmosphere.
As these pieces of rock hit the atmosphere at 37 miles (59 kilometres) per second, they burn up in moments due to the intense heat produced by friction.
Dr Edward Bloomer, senior astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told Daily Mail: 'The shower itself is the Earth slamming into a trail of dusty debris trailing the comet Swift-Tuttle.'
This comet is on a long, 133-year orbit around the sun, so the Earth passes through the cloud of debris at the same time each year.
Dr Bloomer says: 'Since we're hitting it in the same way each year, they radiate from the same part of the sky every year. So here on Earth, they arrive at the same point on the calendar each year, and have a 'radiant' in the area of the constellation Perseus.'
WHY DO METEORS MAKE A SOUND?
Meteors are fragments of space rock that enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up as a result of the friction created when they pass through, appearing as bright streaks of light in the sky.
As well as light, this friction also creates sound, with some meteors creating a 'sonic boom' as they break the sound barrier, in a similar way to a fast-moving aircraft.
Since meteors can be over a hundred kilometres in altitude, and their sound waves travel much slower than the light they generate, the sonic boom is often not heard until many minutes after the flash is seen.
The boom will also only be loud enough to hear from Earth if the meteor is particularly large, enters the stratosphere below an altitude of about 30 miles (50 km) and explodes as a bolide, or fireball.
As well as the boom, some stargazers claim to have heard hissing and buzzing sounds at the same time as a meteor is seen.
This is because meteors also give off very low frequency radio waves, which travel at the speed of light.
These are inaudible, but can cause physical objects on the Earth's surface to vibrate and produce a sound, which our ears may interpret as hissing.
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