The 2012 Perseids Meteor Shower online at NASA

A Perseids composite as  seen on Aug. 12-13, 2011. Concentric circles are star trails.

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend and if you can't catch the "shooting star" spectacle in person, you can tune in online for live views of the meteor display from NASA.

NASA is inviting people to participate in its "Up All Night" live chat with astronomer Bill Cooke and his team from the Meteoroid Environment Office at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., on Saturday night from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. EDT.

Cooke and his colleagues will answer peoples' questions, while participants enjoy live video and audio feeds of the Perseid meteor shower from a camera mounted at the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA officials said.

Experts predict this year's Perseid meteor shower will be an impressive sky show, with a waning crescent moon expected to interfere only slightly with the night sky display.

During the meteor shower's peak this weekend (late Saturday night and into early Sunday morning), many fireballs may also visible in the night sky, NASA officials said.

"We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," Cooke said in a statement.  "The Perseids always put on a good show."

The Perseids are actually bits of rock and debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862.

The comet orbits around the sun once every 133 years, but every August, Earth passes through a cloud of its debris, and as the bits of ice and dust burn up in Earth's atmosphere, they create the spectacular Perseid meteor shower that we are familiar with now.

The Perseids are so-called because they appear to radiate from the direction of the constellation of Perseus.

The meteor shower can be seen all over the sky, but the best places to view Perseids will be across the northern hemisphere, according to NASA.

Leonid Meteor Shower adds to Space Debris Hazards

Meteor showers produce gorgeous light shows. But the space debris responsible for them – usually dust cast off from comets – can seriously damage spacecraft, since it travels at relative speeds of up to 260,000 kilometres per hour.

This year, the Leonid shower peaks on 17 November and could produce a spectacular 300 meteors per hour during its peak.

This image of the 1999 Leonid shower was taken from an aircraft.

(Image: NASA-ARC/Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano/ISAS)


Satellites are not totally defenceless, however. When especially intense meteor showers are expected, they can orient their solar panels edge-on to the stream of impactors to minimise the chance of damage.

That was not possible for the European Space Agency's Olympus 1 satellite during the 1993 Perseid shower. An earlier meteoroid impact had disabled the pointing system on one of its solar arrays, leaving it exposed to the meteors, according to NASA's Bill Cooke.

Unfortunately for Olympus 1, the shower was especially intense that year because the comet responsible for the shower, Swift-Tuttle, had passed by Earth just the year before, leaving a fresh trail of debris.

During the shower, a Perseid impact seems to have led Olympus 1 to spin out of control. Efforts to regain control used up most of the spacecraft's fuel, leaving just enough to send it into a "graveyard" orbit, where it would not hit other satellites.

(Image: ESA)

62 New Meteor Showers Found: Don't Forget Perseids

Every now and again, biologists turn up a bonanza of new species deep in the ocean or in remote corners of the Earth. But astronomers usually have to make do with a trickle of new discoveries, spotting a rare supernova here or a couple of backwards planets there.

Now, researchers in Canada report finding an incredible 62 new meteor showers, displays of 'shooting stars' that recur every year when Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by a comet or asteroid.

"I was surprised to find so many new ones," says team leader Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario.

He credits the wealth of discoveries to the nature of his survey, which detects incoming debris about 10 times as small as can generally be seen by eye, catching objects about 0.1 millimetres across. The survey, based near London, Ontario, uses radar to detect the trail of ionised gases produced as the debris particles slam into the atmosphere at blistering speeds.

The survey measures the paths of the debris particles, allowing researchers to trace their orbits around the sun – and potentially track down their parent bodies. "The central reason for looking at these streams is to trace them back to their origins," Brown told New Scientist.

In an Uncertain Universe: Perseids Meteor Storm is Reliable

The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to put on a good show this week for those willing to get up in the wee hours of the morning and wait patiently for the shooting stars.

In North America, the best time to watch will be between midnight to 5 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but late Tuesday night and also Wednesday night could prove fruitful, weather permitting.

The Perseids are always reliable, and sometimes rather spectacular. The only things that puts a damper on the August show are bad weather or bright moonlight. Unfortunately this week, as the Perseids reach their peak Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the moon will be high in the sky, outshining the fainter meteors.

Still, skywatchers around the globe will have a good chance of spotting the brighter meteors. Some already are enjoying the show.