Stay up for a shooting star spectacle over Vietnam this Sunday

By Pham Huong   August 9, 2017 | 12:26 am PT
Stay up for a shooting star spectacle over Vietnam this Sunday
A Perseid meteor streaks across the sky in August 2016. Photo by Reuters
A bright moon is likely to blur out the fainter meteors, but it should still be a show worth waiting for.

The out-of-this world Perseids meteor shower will be at its peak over Vietnam after midnight on Sunday, but stargazers will be able to enjoy the show during predawn hours from Saturday to Monday, according to the Vietnam Amateur Club of Astronomy.

Arriving just a week after a full moon, visibility may be obscured by the light of the moon and only 40 meteors an hour will be visible to naked eye in the eastern sky, it said.

Newsweek cited NASA’s Bill Cooke as saying in a blog post that 150 meteors per hour are expected from the shower this year, but the number will be canceled out by the bright moon.

“A meteor every couple of minutes is good, and certainly worth going outside to look,” he said, dismissing previous reports that it will be the brightest shower in human history.

The Perseids, active every August, are made up of pieces of space debris that originate from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862. Records of the meteor shower date back almost 2,000 years.

It is visible across the northern hemisphere.

If you're wondering just how mesmerizing a meteor shower can be, watch this video of a Geminids meteor shower over China in 2014.

 
 
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