Star Guide: Perseid meteor shower peaks August 11-14

August is prime time for meteor watching in the northern hemisphere. The Perseid meteor shower reigns king during the warm evenings of midsummer, attracting stargazers to dark sky locations in hope of catching a glimpse of a falling star. This year is especially good since there will be no moon to wash out the celestial fireworks.

Meteor watching is similar to fishing. Fish never seem to bite when you are paying attention, and meteors never appear when you are looking for them. A fisherman might read a book to while the time away between nibbles, while a stargazer might take note of constellations and stars between streaks of light dancing across the sky.

So while you’re out under dark skies August 11-14, the peak of this year’s Perseid meteor shower, find the summer triangle high in the sky to pass the time. The summer triangle isn’t a constellation, it is three bright stars. Visible all summer long high in the sky, these stars mark the locations of three constellations; Lyra, Aquila, and Cygnus. A free stargazing app like SkyPortal by Celestron can be a great help finding them.

Vega is the brightest star in the summer triangle as well as the constellation Lyra. It’s the star that Jodie Foster went to in the movie “Contact.” Vega is the fifth-brightest star in the sky, and one of the most luminous stars in the sun’s local neighborhood at only 25 light years away. Because of precession (wobble of the Earth), Vega was the North Star in 12,000 BCE!

Altair, the next brightest in the summer triangle, is the brightest star in Aquila; it’s even closer than Vega at 16 light years distant, but drops to the 12th-brightest star in the sky since it is smaller and cooler. Altair is a very fast-spinning star. Even though it’s almost twice as massive as the sun, it spins around on its axis every 10 hours, so it is very egg-shaped and bulged at its equator. By comparison, the sun takes about a month to spin around.

Deneb is the third-brightest, and the brightest star in Cygnus. It is the most surprising of the three since it appears almost as bright as Altair, but it is much more distant at 1,400 light years away! It’s about 110 times larger than the sun, and 54,000 times as luminous. It is one of the brightest stars known. Deneb is a great example that you can’t tell the distance of a star by its brightness.

So by now, since you haven’t been looking for meteors, you have probably seen some of the 60 or so per hour that have been falling into the atmosphere of the Earth from the tailings of Comet Swift-Tuttle that passed by our area of the solar system.

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Berendsen is Tony the Star Guide and runs Tahoe Star Tours which can be contacted at 232-0844 or tony@tahoestartours.com.