A dazzling display of the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak on Wednesday night as a bright gift to skywatchers worldwide, said a report from BBC. However, a forecast of a cloud cover and the viewing may not go as well as expected. Since the Perseid Meteor Shower 2015 is going to coincide with the new moon right above the clouds, the conditions may still be favourable.
According to BBC, The Perseids are pieces of Comet Swift-Tuttle. During each August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet's debris. Swift-Tuttle shed this material long ago. It is now distributed as a tenuous "river of rubble" along the comet's orbit around the Sun.
Its radiant (point of origin) appears within the constellation of Perseus and this is how the meteor shower gets its name.
Though the number of visible meteors is hard to predict, it could be as high as 100 per hour. The Perseid shower is active each year from around 17 July to 24 August, although for most of that period only a few meteors an hour are visible.
These particles of ice and dust hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 60km/s. It's sizes range from the size of a grain of sand to around as big as a pea. The streak of light is caused as the particles hit the Earth's atmosphere causing to heat the air around them.
A report from BBC said, The Perseid Meteor Shower 2015 is visible across the Northern hemisphere and from as far as subtropical latitudes south of the Equator. This is when the shower's "radiant," the point from which the meteors appear to originate, is high up in the sky. The higher the radiant, the more meteors appear all over the sky, the report added.
Prof Mark Bailey, the director of Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, said the Perseid Meteor Shower 2015 were "one of the best and most reliable meteor showers of the year," according to the report from BBC.
