What is gracing the August 2024 skies?  A rare conjunction of Jupiter & Mars, great conditions for the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, and all the naked-eye planets visible. 

Hi everybody, I’m Rob Webb, your Last Minute Astronomer, bringing astronomy to normies and nerds, with little time to spare. We’ll start by talking about the big events for the month, then highlight the naked eye planets, and finish up with the lunar phases, so you can plan ahead better than me.  

 

THE BIG EVENT!

11th – 12th – Perseid Meteor Shower – EXCELLENT year for the Perseids, given the first-quarter Moon sets before midnight.  In decent skies, you could watch 60 meteors per hour, and you should be able to see some very bright ones here and there the week before and after. The strategy to observe this year is to get out there whenever you can, but the “wee hours” and the pre-dawn morning on the Monday 12th is when you’ll see the most. The shower is usually technically active from mid-July to late August, so you may see some Perseids in the days leading up to and after the peak as well. Remember, you’re seeing the bits of dust left over from Comet Swift-Tuttle burning up as they crash into the atmosphere at 37 miles per second.

 

Some advice for watching:

- Find a dark location and lie down in a reclining chair or hammock.

- Look toward Perseus. In the NE, it rises throughout the night until sunrise where it will be almost directly above. That is where the radiant is - where the meteors will appear to be coming from. But you should basically just look UP.

- Check the weather ahead of time to see if the skies will be clear.

- Adapt your eyes to the dark by staying away from light sources or using a red light if you need to look at a star chart or not trip over something.  

- Make a game of it! Get the kids counting and do a scientific meteor count (IMO).

 

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