Get Ready: The Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Next Month
The 2020 Perseids are ramping up toward a mid-August peak with dark skies and forecasts of 50-75 meteors an hour.
Mark your calendar now, because the best meteor shower of the year is about to put on a show. The Perseids are already active and building toward their peak, historically landing around August 11-13, and this year the conditions line up nicely for anyone willing to stay up late or set an alarm for the pre-dawn hours.
If you haven’t watched a meteor shower before, the Perseids are the one to start with. They’re consistent, they’re bright, and they don’t require any special equipment. The “shower” is really just Earth plowing through a trail of debris left behind by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which swings through the inner solar system every 133 years or so. As those dust and rock fragments slam into the atmosphere at high speed, they burn up and streak across the sky, and because the comet has been shedding material along the same orbital path for a very long time, Earth crosses through a dense part of that debris field every summer.
Why this year looks promising
The headline number for 2020 is a forecast of 50 to 75 meteors per hour under dark, clear skies at the peak. That’s a solid showing by Perseid standards, and it’s helped along by the moon phase this year — 2020’s peak coincides with a waning moon, meaning less lunar glare washing out the fainter streaks. Moonlight is usually the biggest variable that determines whether a given year’s Perseids feel spectacular or merely decent, so a darker sky window this time around is good news for anyone planning to watch.
Practical advice, since it’s still a few weeks out: you don’t need a telescope or binoculars, and honestly they’ll hurt more than help since you want the widest possible view of the sky. Get away from city lights if you can, give your eyes at least 20-30 minutes to adjust to the dark, and look up and around rather than fixating on one spot — meteors can streak across any part of the sky, though they’ll appear to radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus, which is where the shower gets its name. The hours after midnight and before dawn tend to be the best viewing window, since that’s when your side of the planet is facing more directly into the debris stream.
I’ll circle back closer to the peak with a proper viewing guide, but if you’re the type who likes to plan ahead, now’s the time to pencil in a late night or early morning around August 11-13 and hope for clear skies. It’s one of the more reliably rewarding things you can do with a free night and zero equipment.