As usual
The forecast for Thursday night is overcast, with an option for pissing down.
Saw them from a remote farm in Eire in 1976 - when they're good, they are spectacular.
Glowing meteors streaking across the night sky marks the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower which is expected to be an even more striking spectacle this year, thanks to Jupiter. The smattering of comet dust from the Swift-Tuttle comet reach Earth every year as both their orbits cross, but every so often the meteors get a …
My interest in astronomy has gone from the sky to the net and reading over the years, and each and every time (years ago) I have tried to look for those buggers there are clouds, or perhaps my fuse is just too short and damned it, if I am prepared to lie down or my back. In other words are there any real time net things around, you know about. I start each morning with coffee and
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Given the glowing tent I'm guessing this is really a montage though it could be just looking away from the radiant which sometimes leads to more erratics (meteors not from the storm just the random ones we get) in a long exposure.
Never sure why photographers seem to find a need to pollute sky pictures with earth based objects.
Thursday and Friday clear skies are forecast for Ibiza but much of Spain will be cloudy. Next year I hope to be inland from Valencia, halfway up a modest mountain at my new house, 5 Km from anywhere with street lights I am looking forward to doing a bit of stargazing. I wonder what the chances of a few days of rain will be next year during the Perseids?
So far I can only remember seeing one Perseid meteor ever, through a break in the cloud so I won't be holding my breath.
"Thursday and Friday clear skies are forecast for Ibiza but much of Spain will be cloudy. Next year I hope to be inland from Valencia, halfway up a modest mountain at my new house, 5 Km from anywhere with street lights I am looking forward to doing a bit of stargazing. I wonder what the chances of a few days of rain will be next year during the Perseids?"
Half an hour inland from Valencia after another clear day in the low 30s tonight but its raining as I write :-)
Been no rain for months as usual but more rain expected tomorrow... usually get it for a few days around mid August every year as the weather starts to turn. More so on the higher ground inland. Thurs & Fri look ok though.
Valencia is a lovely part of the world to live in. Hope you have fun... you will if you speak Spanish (Valenciano anyone ? Arrrghghhhh) and spend a lot of time practising it in your local bars....... best way to make new friends !
BTW... Did anyone tell you what winter is like ? Make sure you have good heating.......
Both graphics for this article are technically misleading. The first bears no resemblance to a meteor shower with its radiant point of origin for all trails. The second depicts the orbit of Swift Tuttle, but with the Sun far away from its orbital plane, which isn't possible.
C'mon El Reg, you guys can do better than this, even for a filler article.
In addition to the ridiculous graphics there's also "Jupiter’s gravitational field nudges the meteors 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) closer to Earth, making them appear brighter and twice as frequently across the sky."
Hmm... The particles of dust etc. shed by comet Swift-Tuttle, from which the Perseids are derived, are in independent orbit around the Sun and are spread out all along that orbit. However, the particles are not tightly packed and closely following each other along that orbit but are spread out to either side of it, interestingly enough (because of the figures quoted by El Reg), over a total width, as it were, of ~0.1 AU, or ~1.5 million km/930000 miles. It is because the width of that stream of particles that we can see them over a period of several days, as it takes that long for the Earth to obliquely pass though the entire stream.
At Jupiter's closest approach to that orbital stream (once again using El Reg's numbers of 257 million kilometres/160 million miles), it will be ~1.7 times further away from the closest particles than Earth is from the Sun. Now whilst Jupiter can certainly perturb the orbit of those closest particles, at that sort of distance, stating that it will move them closer to Earth, when the distance is already effectively 0 for the couple of days it takes Earth to pass through them is just nonsensical.
As for the brightness and frequency, well...
C'mon El Reg, you're just making yourself look stupid.
Back in the days when my eyes could still focus on infinity, I could always see about 1 meteor per minute if I lay on my back on any cloudless night without light pollution. (Three examples out of many: on a Norfolk beach, up in the Pyrenees, on a boat in the Ionian sea.) Nowadays I always seem to be in the wrong place and haven't seen much Perseid activity. If somebody with good vision and a dark site does get a good view this week, please do some counting for us and see if you can't comfortably exceed 200 per hour.
Well in 1833 there were 240.000 meteors in 9 hours during a Leonid shower.
During a similar shower there were many suicides by people who thought it was the end of days and they've had to tone it down a bit since then. Health and Safety gone mad if you ask me.
As for visibility I live in a Dark Skies area so I guess we wont get any bright meteors. C'est la Vie!