If you raise your head to the night skies these days, and if weather allows it, most likely you will spot a shooting star or two, and on the right dates – even dozens of them.
Although we have a romantic picture in our mind of making a wish upon a falling, or shooting, star – the brilliant passing light we see in the skies is not quite what most of us think it is.
So – what is a shooting star? Why do we see more of them these days? And how to spot many of them in the skies?
Shooting stars are not at all stars – in the meaning of distant suns. And they do not “fall” out of the skies or wither and die…
What we call a “shooting star” is actually a meteor – a small piece of celestial debris, passing by very close to earth, being lit up by the heat of the collision with earth’s atmosphere – leaving a brilliant incandescent trail.
From time to time we can spot a shooting star (a meteor) in the skies, but at certain times of the year we have a “meteor shower” – meaning that we have a very large concentration of meteors hitting earth’s atmosphere and many, many shooting stars.
Meteor showers are not a random event. They happen on very specific, and known dates, year after year. They occur when Earth, in its journey around the Sun, enters a field of meteoroids (the celestial debris before it hits earth’s atmosphere).
July and August are two months in which Earth passes through two of these fields and therefore there is a large amount of “shooting stars” during this time, and especially between July 23th and August 22nd with a peak on August 12th.
So if weather allows it where you live – this is the time to set your blanket somewhere in nature, and wish upon some shooting stars…