The Perseid meteor shower will peak next week between the nights of Sunday, August 11, and Tuesday, August 13. Meteor showers like the Perseids are best seen between midnight and the pre-dawn hours local time. But if the late-night hours seem a little daunting, NASA’s Meteor Watch Team has the perfect alternative on offer. Starting on the evening of Monday, August 12, and running until the following morning, NASA will stream live the Perseids over Facebook Live.
How to watch the Perseid meteor shower live online with NASA
The US space agency will host a stream of the Perseids on the agency’s official NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page.
The Perseids live stream will kick off at 1am BST on Tuesday (8pm EDT on Monday).
Weather permitting, the NASA live stream will run all through the night before wrapping up the following day.
NASA said the live stream should come to an end in “the early morning hours of August 13”.
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The meteor shower will be broadcast from Huntsville, Alabama, which is home to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
NASA said: “How can you see the Perseids if the weather doesn’t cooperate where you are?
“A live broadcast of the meteor shower from a camera in Huntsville, Alabama – if our weather cooperates – will be available on the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook starting around 8pm ET and continuing until the early hours of August 13.
“Meteor videos recorded by the NASA All Sky Fireball Network are also available each morning; to identify Perseids in these videos, look for events labelled ‘
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Another reason to watch the meteor shower online this year is the presence of a bright Waxing Gibbous Moon at night.
On Monday, the Waxing Moon will approach full illumination, making it harder to spot the shooting stars with the naked eyes.
Under perfect conditions, the Perseids can produce as many as 100 meteors an hour.
With the bright Moon, however, NASA only expects between 15 and 20 meteors to appear per hour.
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What are the Perseid meteors?
Every year between mid-July and the last week of August, the Earth passes through the cosmic rubble left behind in the orbit of Comet Swift-Tuttle.
As the Earth crosses this littered path, the comet’s debris crashes into our atmosphere at high speeds to produce bright streaks of light across the night skies.
NASA said: “All meteors associated with one particular shower have similar orbits, and they all appear to come from the same place in the sky, called the radiant.
“Meteor showers take their name from the location of the radiant.
“The Perseid radiant is in the constellation Perseus.”