Perseids Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend
The night sky display will be at its best Saturday night into Sunday morning. Tell us where you plan to watch!
The Perseids meteor shower will peak Saturday night and into Sunday morning, lighting up the sky with streaks of light if clouds defy the National Weather Service forecast and stay away. The shower splashes through the sky every year in early August when Earth passes through the Swift-Tuttle comet's orbit and sweeps up some of this debris. We see rapid streaks of light as the tiny rocks encounter the Earth's thin upper atmosphere and the air is heated to incandescence. Space.com tells us meteors are tiny bits of rock and debris from an old comet that is named after Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle, the astronomers who discovered it in 1862. For the geeks among us, here's some trivia: The Perseids get their name from Perseus, the …
