It’s a light show that comes every year toward the end of summer, extending for weeks but hitting the maximum in the middle of the city’s festival season as arts patrons get outside and the weather starts to cool.<\/p>\n
The Perseid meteor shower hits its peak Aug. 12, launching streaks through the night sky that look to be coming from the constellation Perseus.<\/p>\n
The shower comes thanks to the detritus from a comet, called Swift-Tuttle, which has an orbit that takes it around the sun once every 133 years. Dr. Stefan Cartledge, the Chair of the Physical Sciences department at MacEwan University who also teaches astronomy, says as the comet nears the sun its surface heats up and starts shedding small bits of rock and ice.<\/p>\n
“We have the comet being effectively like something we are familiar with here in Edmonton: a dirty snowball,” says Cartledge. “So when the earth passes through that orbit, that’s when debris can come into our atmosphere and that’s what we see as the meteor show.”<\/p>\n
Comet Swift-Tuttle was first discovered in 1862 and it was only a few years later when Giovanni Schiaparelli deduced that it was responsible for the meteor shower that lights up the sky every August. His bigger contribution to science was to observe the surface of Mars, drawing the famed Martian canals.<\/p>\n
The meteor itself is about 27 kilometres across; for a comparison, the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater in Mexico \u2013 the one believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs \u2014 was about 10 kilometres across.<\/p>\n
Related<\/p>\n
Intrepid amateur astronomers can find the meteor shower left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle if they gaze upwards starting around 10:30 p.m., looking to the north and northeast at about 30 degrees above the horizon. The meteor shower will shift throughout the night, moving higher in the sky and ending at around 60 degrees above the horizon by the time dawn rolls around.<\/p>\n
The Perseid meteor shower is coming from pebbles and bits of rock only a few millimetres across entering the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Cartledge. As many as 90 meteorites are visible per hour when viewed from dark locations, one every 40 seconds. That frequency is only visible in places such as dark sky preserves outside of the city where light pollution is at a minimum. But even for people looking to catch a glimpse of the meteor shower in darker parts of the city with unobstructed views, they can still expect to catch sight of a spark every three or so minutes.<\/p>\n
“I often mention to my students, if you want to just go out and view a meteor shower, just bring out your long chair, tuck in overnight, make sure that you’re warm enough and have something nice to drink and enjoy yourself.”<\/p>\n
Staying out and watching the sky for streaks of light is exactly what Maia Mudri\u0107 and her astronomy-inclined friends are planning to do. Their Perseid Meteor Shower watch party<\/a> is taking place Aug. 15 at Miquelon Lake, a chance to watch the shower near the peak in a dark location southeast of the city. But it’s also a chance to get outside and connect with nature, organized by the Touch Grass Club.<\/p>\n “This event came about because I think that all facets of nature are really connected. All of the different cycles around us,” says Mudri\u0107, founder of Touch Grass Club. “We don’t really have any festivals that celebrate that.”<\/p>\n On top of star gazing, the event organizers have planned nature walks and Indigenous sky stories, a chance to connect with nature and other people on multiple levels, all in a single event. They have partnered with groups like the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada<\/a> \u2014 Edmonton and VIDEA to bring together such a large cross-section of activities.<\/p>\n It’s the third time the club has run the event, growing from about 30 people back in 2024 to more than 200 this year, a sell-out crowd for a night of astronomical observation. It’s the first they will run Indigenous sky stories over the night, which will be led by science communicator Natasha Donahue; she was previously the Manager of Indigenous Initiatives for Telus World of Science.<\/p>\n “There are so many different reasons to learn these stories: tradition, culture, the connection to our ancestors,” says Donahue, who will talk attendees through sky stories.<\/p>\n The weather will play a big part in any attempt to catch sight of the Perseid meteor shower. The historic levels of rain Edmonton has seen would obviously obscure any night-time viewing. Last year’s Touch Grass Club night was almost rained out, but they still caught a few streaks of light by waiting out the clouds, a little patience leading to a bright payoff.<\/p>\n Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know \u2014 add EdmontonJournal.com<\/a> and EdmontonSun.com<\/a> to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.<\/a><\/p>\n You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton Journal<\/a> | The Edmonton Sun.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s a light show that comes every year toward the end of summer, extending for weeks but hitting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[52,12847,52962,52963,52964,52965],"class_list":["post-164999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-edmonton","tag-meteor-shower","tag-perseid-meteor","tag-perseid-meteor-shower","tag-stefan-cartledge","tag-swift-tuttle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}