JACKSON, Wyo. — The annual Perseid meteor shower will light up Wyoming skies over the weekend, peaking overnight from Sunday, Aug. 11 to Monday, Aug. 12.
The annual meteor shower is caused by dust trains from the Swift-Tuttle comet. The debris enters the earth’s atmosphere and burns up due to the friction with the air, creating a meteor shower, or shooting stars.
According to the American Meteor Society, stargazers in rural areas might glimpse anywhere between 50 and 75 meteors per hour. The moon will be waxing at about half illumination, but conveniently it will set early enough that its light shouldn’t impact the show too severely.
The meteor shower began in mid-July and has steadily increased through mid-August. Expect it to slowly fade in intensity until Sept. 1.
“The first record of the Perseid meteor shower comes from a Chinese manuscript written in A.D. 36,” says the Old Farmer’s Almanac. “The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli linked the Perseid shower to Comet Swift-Tuttle in 1866, four years after the comet was detected by modern astronomers.”
If you snap photos of the shower this weekend, we’d love to feature them in an upcoming Buckrail SNAPPED. Send images to tips@buckrail.com.
