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Get Ready For A Meteor Shower Tonight
Perseid meteor shower as seen from Azusa Canyon (Photo by Mulling It Over via the Creative Commons on Flickr)
There's nothing better than getting to see a meteor shower fill the skies on a summer night—and we'll be having one reach its peak tonight. Another meteor shower will be arriving this week, as well.
The Delta Aquariids will be hitting their peak on Monday and Tuesday nights, with up to 20 meteors per hour, according to the L.A. Times. The Griffith Observatory Sky Report says that the best time to see the showers is on Tuesday from 10 p.m. until dawn (especially at 3 a.m.). Although the Delta Aquariids is a bit on the dimmer side, the fact that the skies will be darker because there won't be much moonlight tonight will make for a more impressive shower.
As with all meteor showers, you'll have to get away from all the city lights to view them, so it might be worth it for a little drive out. However, if you're too lazy to do that, you can check out a live stream of the shower on Slooh.com, which will be airing video of it from Arizona starting at 7 p.m.
But that's not all: we also have the annual Perseids that we'll be able to start seeing this week, and it has a whopping 100 meteors per hour. It peaks on August 12 and 13, but unfortunately, it has to compete with the bright, full moon around that time.
According to Discovery News: "Annual meteor showers are created when Earth passes through a field of debris left in a comet's wake. The particles sloughed off by the cosmic body burn up in the atmosphere, creating the shooting stars people see from dark places on the ground."
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