Naked Eye

Summer meteors
By David Ward
    There is nothing like a balmy mid-summer evening for sitting out under the stars and enjoying the night sky. August is meteor month so don’t miss the celestial fireworks. Every year in our 600,000,000-mile journey around the sun, the earth runs into a number of streams of debris floating around in the solar system. Leftovers from comets and asteroid collisions leave mostly sand-sized particles drifting in space. In mid-August we slam into one of the largest of these streams, which is known as the Perseid meteor shower because it seems to come out of the constellation Perseus from our perspective on Earth.
    This month the shower will be particularly favorable to watch because the nights will be very dark with no moonlight to interfere. Astronomers predict that the shower will peak late Thursday night, Aug.12-13. All you need is your own eyes,. Lying out in a lawn chair is perfect and look at any dark part of the sky. The meteors will appear to be coming out of the northeast, although you might see a few going in other directions. The further you can get from any lights the better and you will probably see more after midnight. If you don’t see a lot at first, don’t give up. This shower often comes in bursts that might last an hour or so. If you are lucky you may see as many as 100 per hour.
    While you are out there looking for tiny grains of sand traveling at 70 times the speed of a bullet through our atmosphere, there are some other cool things to look at also. On the night of August 12 there will be a slim crescent moon hanging low in the West during the evening twilight. The bright object right above it is the planet Venus. Saturn is to the right of Venus and Mars is just above. Those two will be disappearing in the sunset glow pretty soon. If you stay up late, which you should to see the meteors, the planet Jupiter will be rising in the east. It will be the brightest thing in that part of the sky.
    August is a great time to view and contemplate our home in the universe, the Milky Way Galaxy. A dark moonless night is best, like Aug. 12 and 13, when you are watching for meteors. Look for a dim band of light running from north to south across the entire sky. That band is billions of stars that live in our home with us. As your eyes become accustomed to the dark, you might notice blank patches in the Milky Way. These are clouds of dark gas obscuring the light of countless stars beyond. Our galaxy is shaped like a giant pinwheel with spiral arms of stars radiating out from its center. When you are looking overhead you are seeing the Perseid Arm of the galaxy. It is so far away that the light you see has taken about 6,000 years to reach us. Compare that with a seven-minute traveling time for light coming from our sun.
    Down toward the south you are looking in the direction of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Light from there has taken 26,000 years to reach us. Residing right at the center is a super massive black hole that gobbles up a sun like ours every 10,000 years or so for a snack. Good thing we are a long ways away. If the earth were to fall in there, it would be squeezed by the intense gravitational forces down to the size of a pea! 
    So how big is home? If you reduced the Milky Way Galaxy down to the size of the United States, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then on that scale our solar system, the sun and all the planets, would be about 2 inches across. You would have to use a microscope to find our sun and the earth wouldn’t be much bigger than an atom. Does that make you feel small? Well, it should, especially if you take into account that the Milky Way is just one of trillions of other galaxies that astronomers can see way out there.
    Happy meteor watching and don’t forget to remember how tiny we all are!