The Persieds

Persieds Radient, peaking Thursday night / Friday Morning

The main event this week has to be the Perseid meteor shower. They peak this year at 2 am Friday morning, so tomorrow night as late as you can manage is the best time for viewing. You need to look to the Northeast, there are no obvious stars nearby, the best way to find the radiant is to find Cassiopeia, which looks like a wonky W on its side. If you can’t find Cassiopeia, then I hope you can find the plough. Take a line from the two stars through the end of the dipper which takes you to Polaris, the North Star, keep going and you’ll find Cassiopeia. Now take a line from the lower internal diagonal in the triangle toward a couple of brightish stars and your there. Failing that just look to Northeast 30-40 degrees up, and if you don’t know where the Northeast is, have you considered suicide.

This year should be a good one because the moon is just off new and will be trailing the sun on the way to New York, it was 2007 when we last had a moonless Perseid Shower. If you’re a special type of Anorak you can count how many you see in a certain time and send the data in to the International Meteor Organization, who will compile it all and put it into a very interesting book. Though all this wholly academic because its bound to be overcast, but the Perseids will still be showing right up to the 22^nd.

The shower is caused by the Earth passing through the orbit of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which is due back in 2016 when the show will be much more vivid.

We still have Venus, Mars and Saturn waltzing around very close to each other shortly after evening twilight in the west. Unfortunately this means that Saturn and Mars are on the other side of the Sun and are about as far away as they get. Venus on the other hand is getting closer to us and should be visible as a bright crescent in a good pair of binoculars.

Jupiter is up now well before midnight in south east and dominates the Southern sky for the rest of the night, you can’t miss it.

That was your Scilly stars for the week ending on 127th anniversary of the first public performance of the Dominican Republic.