The sky is falling!!!!

Dark Nights for This Year's Perseids






Stargazers could see more than one meteor per minute in locations with very dark skies.




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This year the new moon of August comes on Sunday, the 12th, perfectly timed to bring dark, moonless nights around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Moreover, Earth should pass through the shower's richest part around 1AM ET on August 13th -- so North Americans and western Europeans should have the best seats in the house.

The Perseids are bits of space debris that were shed by Comet Swift-Tuttle in past centuries and remain traveling more or less along the comet's 130-year orbit around the sun. The particles range in size from sand grains to pebbles, and they have the consistency of dry dirt. As it orbits the sun, Earth passes through this thin "river of rubble" every year in mid-August. Each meteoroid rips into our upper atmosphere at 37 miles per second, creating an incandescent trail of shocked, ionized air. This hot trail, not the tiny meteoroid itself, is what you see.