Your guide to 2024’s Perseid meteor shower | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Aug, 2024
Peaking on the night of August 11/12, up to 100 bright meteors per hour will be visible. Here’s how to make the most of it.
Every year in August, the night sky comes alight with meteors, as planet Earth plows through the debris stream of Comet Swift-Tuttle, giving rise to the Perseid meteor shower. Because of Swift-Tuttle’s large, massive size and the fact that it’s been in its present orbit for thousands of years, it’s produced an impressively large debris stream. The The fact that Swift-Tuttle travels very far from Earth, as it has an orbital period around the Sun of 133 years (nearly twice as long as Halley’s comet), means that the debris moves very rapidly with respect to Earth. And the fact that Swift-Tuttle is also a potentially hazardous object to Earth — one that crosses Earth’s orbits nearly perfectly — means that each year, as Earth passes through its debris stream, the meteor shower that it puts on is spectacular.
The Perseid meteor shower is reliably Earth’s greatest annual show, with around 100 meteors-per-hour at its peak and where most of the meteors fast-moving, with a lot of kinetic energy, results in a bright, luminous show from practically anywhere on Earth with clear skies. Although the Moon can often get in the way, this year, on the night of…
