How to Watch the Supercharged Perseid Meteor Shower
The annual sky show may produce up to 200 meteors an hour thanks to the pull of giant Jupiter.
Sky-watchers around the world are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the annual Perseid meteor shower, which peaks this year from August 11 to 13. And if astronomers’ predictions hold out, the 2016 sky show could present celestial fireworks unlike anything seen in years.
The Perseids grace our skies when Earth plows through a cloud of fragments left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle, which last flew near the sun back in 1992. As the space rock zooms in from deeper reaches of the solar system, its ices vaporize and it releases debris ranging in size from sand grains to boulders. The particles get spread along the comet’s orbital path in such a way that Earth regularly crosses the debris field.
When that happens, the
