The 2016 Perseid meteor shower in pictures

The spectacular annual Perseid meteor shower peaked overnight on August 11th. It was a bumper year, with some 200 meteors lighting up the sky every hour when the shower was at its most active.

The Perseids are seen as Earth passes through a trail of dust and debris left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. They are so named because they appear to radiate from the constellation of Perseus, the rescuer, in Greek mythology, of Andromeda (whose constellation is a little to the west of Perseus) who was in turn the daughter of Cassiopeia (a little to the north).

The dust particles hit the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 200,000kmph and vaporise at an altitude of about 100km, giving the appearance of bright streaks of light zipping across the sky, with the larger fragments creating fireballs that sometimes explode.

This year’s display peaked early, and that peak was more spectacular than the normal one of 60-100 an hour; the gravitational pull of Jupiter tugged together a number of meteor streams so that the Earth passed through them…Continue reading
Source: Economist