Choose the date, select Featured News or Conditions and press View. GIVE THE GIFT OF THE PERSEIDS: Do you have a friend or loved one who doesn’t know when to look at the sky? Give them a free subscription to our new Backyard Astronomy Alert Service. Our promise: We will never let you miss another meteor shower or solar eclipse! BEST PERSEID SHOWER IN YEARS: Why is this year’s Perseid meteor shower so good? Two words: New. Moon. When the rain peaks on the night of August 12-13, there won’t be a single photon of moonlight to spoil the show. The shower is already running. Sky cameras operated by NASA and others have detected more than a dozen fireballs each night this week. Here’s one over Missouri: “This was a very bright early Perseid meteor that entered the atmosphere about 4 days before the expected maximum,” says photographer Dan Bush. “This clip is from the same night as the bright ‘point source’ meteor described below.” When the shower reaches its peak, the number of meteorites will increase 10-fold, with up to 100 sightings every hour, ranging from faint streaks to bursting fireballs. The source of the shower is the giant comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Its core is 26 kilometers wide, more than twice the size of the object that killed the dinosaurs. Every 133 years it travels through the inner solar system, leaving a new ribbon of dust that the Earth must pass through every August. Viewing Tips: Stay away from city lights and look up during the hours between local midnight and sunrise. That’s when the radiant shower in the constellation Perseus rises very high. Give your eyes 30 minutes to adjust to the darkness and enjoy the show! RARE ‘METEOR SPOT’: The Perseid meteor shower is underway, but it wasn’t Perseids. On August 9, Dan Bush’s night sky camera in Albany, Missouri, recorded a rare ‘spot meteor’: “This was a first for me in my 45 years of meteor watching,” Bush says. “This meteor was coming straight at me! Notice how the meteor doesn’t appear to be moving in any direction except directly toward the camera.” This is, by definition, a “spot meteor”: a rare visual phenomenon in which a meteor appears as a stationary flash rather than a long streak. The trajectory of the disintegrating meteoroid is, by chance, perfectly aligned with that of the observer. “It comes from the constellation Aquarius,” says Bush. That means it was probably a “sporadic” meteor: a random meteoroid not associated with any organized stream of comet debris like the Perseids. Real-Time Space Weather Photo GalleryFree: Space Weather Newsletter CAMPO DEL SKY METEORITE PENDANT: This meteorite came from space. We send it again. Earth to Sky Calculus students launched it into the stratosphere aboard a cosmic ray research balloon, more than 109,620 feet above the Sierra Nevada near Bishop, CA: you can get it for $349.95. Encased in a sterling silver cage, this is a genuine Campo del Cielo iron-nickel meteorite from Argentina. It landed on Earth between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago and made the return trip on August 1, 2026. This pendant comes with a Certificate of Authenticity and a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight. Students are selling space charms to pay the helium bill for their cosmic ray balloon flight program. Each comes with a greeting card showing the jewels in flight and telling the story of their journey to the stratosphere and back. Far Away Gifts: Earth to Sky StoreAll Sales Support Hands-On STEM Education Real-Time Aurora Photo GalleryFree: Spaceweather.com Newsletter
