Centripetal Notion

image credit: Pierre Martin, taken August 12, 2006

Tomorrow night, Sunday, August 12, around 9:00 pm (in your local time zone), this year’s Perseid meteor shower will be starting to peak. These meteors are considered “earthgrazers”: they will appear on the horizon and skim long and colorful overhead. By 2 am Monday morning their rate might be up to dozens an hour, climaxing around dawn at more than one a minute.

Earth passes through the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle producing this meteor shower every August, but as luck would have it this Sunday will also bring a new moon, so the sky will be at its darkest.

ARTICLE [NASA info on this year's showers]
ARTICLE [Perseids] (Wikipedia)