The Perseid meteor shower meets the bright moon

As the Perseid meteor shower approaches on Friday, August 12, the Moon will be full. Amid our Northern Hemisphere summer, this shower is one of the strongest that returns every year.

The moonlight will hide most meteors, but it is still worth watching. During the night of August 12-13, the Perseid meteor shower peaks, lasting nearly a month.

When there is no moonlight, you are watching after midnight, are away from light pollution with a wide open, rural sky, and you may see 60 to 100 meteors each hour. Several nights before the peak, the shower is quite strong.

As a result of collisions with meteors and asteroids over the eons, the Moon, riddled with craters large and small, shines brightly and covers most of the craters.

The amount of sunlight reflected by the Moon would be much greater without the hardened, dark lava plains on the lunar surface and the rugged lunar highlands that are made up of craters on craters, mountain ranges, and sinuous valleys.

As a result of a smooth Moon's bright light, we would be unable to see the stars that we see when the Moon is full or close to full, but we still can do so when the Moon is not smooth.

The Moon has an albedo of 0.12, which means it reflects only 12% of the radiation it receives. Due to its proximity to the Sun, the full Moon is the brightest. Telescope images show craters and mountains without shadows.

A full Moon is about magnitude -12.6 on the magnitude scale of brightness. It is -26.7. Sirius is -1.44. Venus is magnitude -4.4. We can usually see magnitude +6.0 stars without optical aid.

While the Moon would be bright if it were perfectly smooth, it wouldn't be as bright as the Sun since the light doesn't bounce back directly to the Earth. I want to return to the Perseid meteor shower. Make use of the next clear night before the Moon gets brightest.

 When the Moon is in its waning phase, it sets before the night has ended, so it is best to look in the wee hours before sunrise the week before the full phase. Usually, meteor showers peak after midnight, including the Perseids. A meteor stream is in the path of the Earth in its orbit.

The meteor shower appears to radiate from a certain point in the sky between midnight and sunrise when we are moving forward and hitting the meteors 'face on.' This is similar to driving through a snowstorm at night with your headlights on.

The radiant is located near the constellation Cassiopeia, which is shaped like a W. It rises in the northeast late at night, and more meteors can be seen later in the evening.

The Perseids are visible everywhere in the sky and all trace back to this radiant. You may see 'stray' meteors or meteors from another shower. With moonlight, many Perseid meteors can be seen. Moonlight, however, makes them harder to see.

Meteorites are tiny pieces of Comet Swift-Tuttle. Their vaporization can be seen 60 to 100 miles up in our upper atmosphere. Keep an eye out for Saturn rising low in the east-southeast at night. Saturn's rings can be seen even with a small telescope at 40x or more.