Perseid meteor shower: best places in the world to see it, including Hong Kong – hope for a cloudless night
This year is apparently a good one to watch the annual Perseid meteor shower as the moon will set before it starts, meaning less light to obscure the view. Here are some of the best places to catch the spectacular sight
If you only stare up at the night sky once this summer, make it the weekend of August 11 to 13. The Perseid meteor shower will burst into light for a few hours around midnight early on the Sunday and Monday mornings, bringing bright, streaking shooting stars to dark skies all over the world.
An annual event beloved of astronomers, stargazers and nature lovers, the Perseid meteor shower is caused by Earth’s orbit around the Sun taking it through a stream of dust and debris left over by the Swift-Tuttle comet, which last passed through the solar system in 1992.
It is named after the constellation of Perseus, which is where the meteors appear to radiate from. As Earth moves through the stream, particles called meteoroids hit its atmosphere and briefly energise to become shooting stars.
Seeing a bright meteor streak across the night sky is an incredible sight that requires only the naked eye to observe. And this year is apparently a particularly fine year to see the Perseids because the moon will set just before the shower starts, says Diego Janches, a research astrophysicist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US.
“It promises to be a spectacle worth seeing,” Janches says. “Just after midnight is when the activity should become interesting.”
The Hong Kong Space Museum advises that observers look skywards between 9.30pm on 12 August and 5am on 13 August. It also says that local observation conditions in Hong Kong are rated as excellent, though it is referring to the lack of moonlight rather than the likelihood of clear skies.