Perseid meteor shower lights up the sky
Annual show will be brightest after moon sets between 3 and 5 a.m.
The Perseid meteor shower — one of the year's best and brightest displays of shooting stars — is expected to yield hundreds of meteors tonight and early Thursday morning. It began Tuesday night.
The cosmic show occurs once a year when the Earth moves through streams of debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. The meteors appear to fall from the constellation Perseus, which is where the shower got its name.
The meteors will be visible to the naked eye as soon as the sky gets dark, but the best time to see them will be 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., after the moon sets, said Torvald Hessel, president and executive director of the Austin Planetarium. The moon will rise about 11:15 p.m. he said, making the shower less visible after midnight until about 3 a.m., he said.
Tonight's and Thursday's forecast call for partly cloudy skies with a chance of rain, according to the National Weather Service.
"It is exciting enough to definitely go out and take a look to see if you can see something," Hessel said. "This is one of the most significant meteor showers of the year."
A meteor, or shooting star, is the visible trace of a meteoroid as it enters the Earth's atmosphere.
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