Rain shooting stars for the weekend - The País.com (Spain)

celestial prognosis is good this year to observe the Perseids, shooting stars in this year Apoca abound in the night sky. The light of the moon, a crescent, it will detract from the show because it will be hidden soon. The best night for viewing will be from Monday to Tuesday next, but Sunday should be seen in the sky the meteors. “With a little luck you may see a shooting star per minute, on average,” announces Robert Naeye expert in Sky & Telescope magazine . The International Meteor Organization predicts a maximum of racing. To enjoy the night observation of this phenomenon is recommended to seek a very dark sky (without annoying city lights), pollution-free and highly visible, no need any special equipment to see the shooting stars, only eyes adapt the dark and wait. Perseids can be seen all over the sky, but preferably in northeast direction, toward the constellation Perseus.

shooting stars “are small dust particles of different sizes, some smaller than grains of sand left by the comet along its orbit around the sun,” say the experts at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC ). “When a comet approaches the inner regions of the solar system, its core, composed of ice and rock, is sublimated by the action of the sun’s radiation and generates the characteristics tails of dust and gas, the resulting particle stream dispersed by the comet’s orbit and is crossed every year by the Earth on its journey around the Sun, “they add. “During that meeting, the dust particles disintegrate at high speed when entering the Earth’s atmosphere, creating light trails known that meteors are called”.

For the Perseids-each year in mid-August are 109P/Swift-Tuttle comet debris. Particles (with sizes ranging from a grain of sand to a pea) enter the Earth’s atmosphere (about 130 miles high) at a speed of 60 kilometers per second creating traces of incandescent gas, says Sky & Telescope .

109P/Swift-Tuttle comet, which returns to the vicinity of the sun every 133 years (the last time it did in 1992), has a large core of about 26 kilometers in diameter, compared with other objects of this type, so that leaves lots of debris in space. Obviously, the Perseids were especially abundant in the nineties, after the visit of the comet, but the following will not occur until 2122.