The ‘awesome’ Perseid meteor shower is awfully overhyped
200 meteors per hour is only three per minute, and with a more-than-half full moon out, you might want to stay inside.
“My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn’t know what he wanted to do. He wouldn’t tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky.” -Steven Spielberg
At many different times throughout the year, the planet Earth passes near a comet or asteroid’s orbital path, with the result being a meteor shower. Under most circumstances, these showers are modest shows, with anywhere from a handful per hour to two or three per minute visible to a human on Earth. On very rare occasion, however, this rate can spike tremendously, producing a phenomenon known as a meteor storm, where a meteor may be visible every few seconds, on average, exceeding 1,000 meteors-per-hour. The last meteor storm to be visible on Earth was 2001′s Leonid meteor shower; we haven’t seen such a spectacular outburst since. And despite what you might have heard elsewhere, you won’t see one this year, either.
