In the middle of August — every year — Earth passes through a swath of crunchy gunk left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. Comets have orbits, planets have orbits, and sometimes these orbits overlap… just as long as they’re not at the same place at the same time then there’s no big-time collision. But these comets leave bits of rock and ice in their wake, and when our planet later goes through that spot, we get lots of small-time collisions instead… in the form of meteors. Little particles burn up in the atmosphere (meteors); larger chunks make it to the ground (meteroites).
Comet Swift-Tuttle made a re-appearance in 1992, refreshing its orbital path with lots of fresh new grit for the Earth to sweep up on its next pass. My nephew came to visit us in August shortly after that, and we hopped in the pickup truck and headed out to a remote area with no city lights — and the show was spectacular! (The “Astronomy Picture of the Day” here is a time-lapse of a night in August 2009, but that’s a good representation of how I remember that night on the pickup truck in the early 1990′s…)
There were from three to five at once, brilliant lines of burning rock, lighting up the night sky. It was eerie how full the sky was of these glowing bits of shrapnel from space.
Well, for 2009, I had early-morning commitments on Thursday August 13 and Friday August 14, so I wasn’t able to stay up as late as I’d like to have, to see the meteors (that’d be around 2-3am for optimal activity).
Zut alors!
But many other folks did, and here are some captured by the fine folks over at Flickr.com.
(Also be sure to check out Stellarium — it’s been around quite a while and it’s really an awesome desktop astronomy program!)