Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight

Instead of staring at the TV late Thursday night, how about staring at the sky?
Stargazing is on the agenda for many people this week with the annual Perseid meteor shower reaching its peak late Thursday and into early Friday.
While some local events will provide access to telescopes, they’re unnecessary during the shower -- anyone can catch the show, said David McDonald, director of education at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, N.H..
"You never know where they’re going to appear," McDonald said. "When they do appear, they’re moving pretty quickly. Telescope views would be just happenstance, and very lucky."
The meteors are best viewed with the naked eye and from the ground. "Go outside, lie down," McDonald said. "Do not stand and cock your neck back."

Meteor shower August 2010: Perseid meteor shower tonight illuminate the sky

Meteor shower August 2010: Perseid meteor shower tonight illuminate the sky giving a reason to enjoy for stargazers

Many people have already witnessed the meteor shower during the last two days and with shower continuing even now, the laziest ones among us would be able to watch and enjoy them.

But you may not be able to experience good meteor shower if the place is cloudy or if you fail to reach the place in advance.

But even if you are not able to watch them in the sky falling all around you and illuminating the sky don’t lose your heart, you may still be able to watch it tonight.

Meteoroid streams are caused by the debris of comets. The stuff of comets comes from interstellar space where the materials are assembled in the atmospheres of stars and in the dense molecular clouds of gas and dust between the stars.

The comets are build of that material and were formed in the outer parts of the solar system, in regions beyond Saturn's orbit, at the time of the birth of our solar system.

How meteoroids leave the comet is a matter of research. When comets approach the Sun, the ices evaporate and the dust particles are ejected into orbit in geyser like fountains.

Comet nucleus is the mountain of ice and dust (mostly dust) that is at the center of a comet. This picture is the nucleus of comet 1P/Halley.

The nucleus of this comet was photographed by the Giotto Satellite in 1986. It has a 2-3 times larger nucleus than 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle is the parent of the Leonid meteoroid stream. The orbit is shown in the graph above.

Persistent train is the long enduring emission that remains in the path of a bright fireball once the afterglow has faded. Persistent trains can last for 1-30 minutes (typically 4-6 minutes) at an apparent brightness of +4 to +5 magnitude.

The optical light of these long enduring trains is from Na (sodium) and FeO (iron oxyde), from airglow-type chemistry of the recombination of oxygen atoms and ozone molecules that is catalised by sodium and iron atoms.

Persistent trains last long enough to enable telescopic studies of the path of a meteor. Upper atmosphere winds distort the shape of the train.

Meteors are better known as "shooting stars": startling streaks of light that suddenly appear in the sky when a dust particle from outer space evaporates high in the Earth's atmosphere.http://worldhotsearch1.blogspot.com/