In case you want to watch some more meteors, it’s the Perseid meteor shower this week, and you should get some good views from now till Friday, with the peak being tonight (early hours of 13th, UTC).
This shower is because the Earth is passing through the trail of the comet Swift-Tuttle. It’s usually a big shower, visible in north and south hemispheres, with no particular place in the sky being better to look than others. At the peak there can be as many as a shooting star every minute, but they do tend to cluster – regularity is not a feature of the meteorites, only the comets!
You can read more about meteor showers in my A to Z post, including the most comfortable ways of seeing them.
picture credit Jure Atanakov via dailymail.co.uk
I’m hoping to get out to see them tonight. Usually, I have to miss out because of the day job and I need to be well rested for that, but I have the day off tomorrow so I can stay up.
Good luck! We had cloud last night, and I couldn’t see any in the short time I looked the night before. Tonight is forecast cloudy, but then so is this afternoon and its fine at present.
Last night’s Perseids were super! We had thin wispy clouds but thin enough to see stars through, and patches of clear sky. The first I saw started straight above me and was very bright, and tailed all the way SSW to the horizon. Then there were some smaller ones in the next five minutes, then just as I was thinking of giving up, another huge one, which seemed to leave a wiggly trail behind,it, which must have been a trick of the atmosphere, again starting above me and heading due south – followed quickly by three more small ones that blinked and streaked briefly and went out.
There were another two good sized ones a few minutes later, then I called it a night as the cloud was increasing. 9 in 12 minutes makes 45 per hour, pretty much on the top of the peak expected. Lucky to catch it before the cloud rolled in, though – tonight we’re due rain and thunderstorms.