August is meteor month, and it should be a good show this year. The moon is out of the way and will not interfere with its bright light that washes out all the dimmer stars and meteors. The shower will peak on the night of Aug. 12 and early morning before dawn on Aug. 13.
Meteor showers are a lazy man’s astronomical treat. You do not have to worry about the confusing shape of the constellations or stars with unpronounceable names. All you have to do is lay back in your lounge chair and watch the shooting stars fly.
Shooting stars?
Every now and then at a star program I run into someone who really thinks those are real stars flying across the sky. Stars are huge. Our sun, which is a whimpy-sized star, is thousands of times bigger than the Earth. If those were actual stars flying around up there, we would be in big trouble.
Think small. Like the size of a kernel of Raisin Bran cereal or an apple seed. Meteors are pretty much the smallest thing astronomy notices. It is their speed that sets them apart. Speed is their glory and their demise. They slam into our atmosphere at a staggering 250,000 miles an hour at their fastest.
The friction created when they start hitting air molecules a couple of hundred miles up immediately heats them to white hot, and poof, they are gone. If you see one with a distinct head and a tail that stretches out across the sky, you may be seeing one as big as a golf ball.
So why are they up there, and why do we see them just once a year? These little streaks of light flying across the sky are actually the remains of an exploded comet. It left a trail of debris circling the solar system and once a year we, the Earth, pass through it.
For a pleasant and successful meteor viewing experience, search for an open area with a view of most of the sky away from any distracting lights. The meteors can be seen in any part of the sky, but if you trace their paths back, they appear to originate from the constellation Perseus in the northeast.
The best time of night is after midnight and before dawn. That is when we are looking through the front “windshield” of the Earth. Didn’t know we had a front windshield? That is when we are gazing out into space in the direction that we are going, and we are slamming right into those little bran flakes.
The big pinwheel
Enough about the small stuff, let’s talk about the big. One thing I like about August is that we can see those little bran flakes and one of the largest structures in our corner of the universe all in the same breath. What am I talking about? The Milky Way galaxy.
Imagine a giant pinwheel structure of 300 billion stars stretching over a space of 100,000 light years. I recently read about a study that suggests it is much larger, but I will stick with what is generally accepted for now.
I know I told you that you would not have to look for any constellations, but wouldn’t you want to see the biggest thing you have ever seen? This thing is huge. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles. A hundred thousand of those is beyond our ability to comprehend.
Look for its hazy glow stretching from north to south across the sky passing almost overhead. The center of the whole thing is low in the south where one of the strangest inhabitants of the universe resides, a massive black hole. Thankfully at 25,000 light years distant, we are too far away to be sucked into its grasp. Overhead, the closest spiral arm is about 6,000 light years away.
Where are we in all of this? Our own personal star, the Sun, is cruising along at 500,000 miles an hour, tugging the Earth and all the other planets along with it. We are currently tucked away between two of those spiral arms, safe for now from the huge destructive forces of the universe.
That bright object low in the west just after sunset is Venus. Enjoy her beauty now while you can. She will be riding off into the sunset soon on her way to becoming the morning star. I hope you have a great night of meteor watching, and while you are out there be sure to look for the Milky Way.
