It may often seem that amateur astronomy is dominated by large telescopes, expensive imaging kit and smartphone apps, but in fact there is still one branch of amateur astronomy requires practically nothing at all: meteor observing. Although there can be sporadic meteors all year round, we usually observe them when well-established showers are underway. And perhaps the best-known annual meteor shower of them all, the Perseids, takes place this month. With the Moon only a slender waning crescent and very little moonlight to drown meteors out, the prospects for this year's shower are looking good.
The Perseid meteor shower gets its name from its radiant (the point in the sky where the meteors appear to come from) being in the constellation of Perseus. In much the same way, the radiant of the Geminid meteor shower lies in Gemini, the Leonids have their radiant in Leo, and so on.
As one of the most prolific meteor showers, the Perseids feature in folklore and myth. It used to be said that the Perseid meteors were the 'tears of Saint Lawrence', as some believed they were the sparks from the fire on which Saint Lawrence was martyred in 258 AD. We had to wait until 1866 for the real cause of the shower to be identified: that was when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli correctly identified comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle as its source, which passes through the inner Solar System every 133 years.
What are meteors?
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