We are approaching the best time of the year for meteor showers, so grab a blanket, some brewskies, and this handy guide to actually finding them.


It’s just the beginning of meteor shower season, and according to NASA, the Perseids peak in mid-August. But the festivities begin in mid-July. The Perseids are popular because they mostly occur during our warmest season, which makes the prospect of sitting outside to see them immensely appealing. They often have long streaky tails, and can rain down in numbers of 50-100 an hour. The Perseids also feature “fireballs,” which are meteors of bright color and longer streaks that sometimes have “magnitudes greater than -3.” That’s big.

When You Can See It

NASA says the showering will begin July 14 and continue through August 24. Their meteor expert Bill Cooke told Space.com that the best nights will be August 11-12 and August 12-13, leaning more towards the later.


“This year the moon will be near new moon, it will be a crescent, which means it will set before the Perseid show gets underway after midnight,” said Cooke. “The moon is very favorable for the Perseids this year, and that’ll make the Perseids probably the best shower of 2018 for people who want to go out and view it.”

Where You Can See It

Best viewing will be for anyone in the Northern hemisphere, but there should be some viewing available to people in the mid-southern latitudes. The best times to see them are in the pre-dawn hours, so you could make it a camping adventure or an after-party event, but they sometimes begin to appear as early as 10 PM. Being in nature or away from light pollution is obviously the best option for visibility; check the weather, too, in case there’s a cloudy night ahead. According to Cooke, it takes human eyes a half hour to adjust to a dark environment, so it may be a minute before you can see these falling stars. Bring some patience when you go.

Where They’re Coming From

Meteor showers are not actually falling stars; they’re bits of space debris that are attached to a comet’s tail, usually bits of the comet itself or broken asteroids. The Perseids this summer are a part of a comet called 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which was first discovered in 1862. It takes 133 years for Swift-Tuttle to orbit the sun, and the last time it was in the inner-solar system was 1992. The Perseids’ “radiant,” or where they appear to come from in the sky, is the constellation Perseus: hence the same. The meteor shower’s actual source, however, is that enormous comet, dropping its beautiful space garbage for our enjoyment.