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lots of shooting stars: Perseids will be at peak tonight (in europe)

Cirocco

By Cirocco
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Cirocco

Cirocco

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Not sure if it's been mentioned on the forums yet, but tonight (night in Europe anyway) the Perseids will be at peak. This means that the earth is passing through a dust cloud and leads to a lot of dust particles burning up in the atmosphere, meaning lots of shooting stars.

Tonight from midnight to 04:00 (GMT+1) will be the peak with up to 70 shooting stars per hour, though you'll see an increased amount of shooting stars throughout the entire night. Some tips to get the best view:

- try to be somewhere away from light pollution. That basically means away from cities.

- look northward

- get a comfy chair, let your eyes adjust to the darkness and look at the sky for at least 15 minutes

and finally: wish away :)

*note: neither the universe, the atomizing dust particle nor any other person, entity or event, cosmological or otherwise, can give guarantee of wish fulfillment. Also, no refunds.

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Elthy

Elthy

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I saw some tonight, about 30. Several of them left a glowing trail you could see for a few seconds, one was so damn bright we nearly fell of our deck chairs, realy exciting. I also saw lots of satellites, the ISS, one bright irdium flare and an unidentified flash. This was just a small point of sudden brightness in the center of the sky (i remember there was a name for this position) around midnight, but i have no idea what it couldve been (i know i realy saw it since some of my friends saw it, too)...

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vger

vger

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What a perfect night. Northeast U.S. Went out at about 1:30AM. No clouds, perfectly clear, comfortable temperature. Saw more meteors in a half hour than I have in all the other events I've watched combined. Definitely close to the 100 per hour that was predicted. Saw residual streaks for the first time ever. And... I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but having seen so few before, I never knew they came in 'different colors.' A purple meteor! Whoa.

And one weird thing happened; I can't be sure of what I was seeing. Best guess is that it was a huge cluster of very small fragments all burning up at one time. It looked like a faint cloud, roughly the size of my fist if I held it away from me at arms length. Same speed as a meteor, and vanishing in under a second.

Edited by vger
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Cirocco

Cirocco

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blah, I only caught a couple in one and a half hours staring at the sky. Bloody light pollution is far too high in Belgium.

Still, caught 4 shooting stars, 2 satellites (one might have been the ISS, it was due to pass overhead I think) and a whole bunch of uninteresting planes.

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cantab

cantab

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blah, I only caught a couple in one and a half hours staring at the sky. Bloody light pollution is far too high in Belgium.
That's been my experience in past showers. Didn't look last night, but there was only a short period before the clouds closed in anyway.
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tater

tater

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We watched from the patio with the kids for about 30-60 min last night and saw maybe 25 decent meteors (didn't count any faint "slash" ones, only bright guys that moved across a decent chunk of sky). About 5 elicited involuntary "wow!"s from all of us.

light pollution was bad to the west, but our house is about 500m above the city, so looking east towards the mountain we can even see the Milky Way.

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Jasel

Jasel

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I couldn't stay up late but I still tried to capture a few. Most were to faint and the surrounding light pollution really made them hard to see. However when I was testing my camera focus and randomly pointed my camera in a general direction I got this one:

20150812_Perseid_2048.jpg

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Motokid600

Motokid600

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I saw some tonight, about 30. Several of them left a glowing trail you could see for a few seconds, one was so damn bright we nearly fell of our deck chairs, realy exciting. I also saw lots of satellites, the ISS, one bright irdium flare and an unidentified flash. This was just a small point of sudden brightness in the center of the sky (i remember there was a name for this position) around midnight, but i have no idea what it couldve been (i know i realy saw it since some of my friends saw it, too)...

Saw one the other night too. What you witnessed was a meteor heading straight at you. It's incredibly rare.

As for the shower... Meh. Was outside last night here in the north east us. Beautiful night, but I only saw four.

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