Celestial News: August brings a meteor shower and a blue moon

Jul 31, 2023

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A comet named Swift-Tuttle zooms past the Earth every 133 years, spewing steam and dust in its wake. Its most recent swing through the inner solar system was in 1992, and it won’t be back until the year 2125.

None of us will be around to see comet Swift-Tuttle’s return, but all is not lost. You can watch tiny pieces of Swift-Tuttle burn up in Earth’s atmosphere every summer in mid-August in a spectacular shower of falling stars. We call it the annual Perseid meteor shower.

We experience this shower of meteors every August because the Earth plows head-on into the dusty river left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle as it orbits the Sun. The particles shed by the comet are very tiny — not much larger than grains of sand — but when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere traveling 37 miles per second, they burn up in brilliant streaks of light.

If the sky is dark and clear, a single observer usually can count between 60 and 90 meteors per hour during the Perseid meteor shower’s peak. Many of the brightest meteors leave glowing trails that can persist for many seconds after they burn out. The meteors appear to spring out of the constellation Perseus in the northeastern sky, just below the familiar W-shaped star pattern of Cassiopeia.

This year, peak activity is expected to occur Aug. 13 in the hours before dawn, but a large number of meteors can be seen for about a week on either side of this peak, as the shower ramps up to maximum and back down. More meteors can be expected in the hours between midnight and dawn. That’s when the Earth has us facing into the direction of the oncoming dust swarm.

Sometimes, bright moonlight can interfere with Perseid meteor watching, but that won’t be the case this year. As luck would have it, the peak of the Perseid meteor shower this time is sandwiched between two August super full moons, the green corn full moon on Aug. 1 and an unusual blue moon on Aug. 30. Mid-month will be dark and moon free.

It isn’t a confluence of cosmic forces that allows two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. It’s more of a strange twist in our calendar. A full moon happens once every 29.53 days, so in a month of 30 or 31 days, that leaves plenty of time to fit in two full moons, provided the first full moon happens on the first or second day of the month.

On average, a full moon falls on the opening day of a month about once every 2.5 years. This year’s full green corn moon happened Aug. 1 and that allows for an extra full moon on Aug. 30.

Traditionally, if a second full moon happens in the same calendar month, it is called a blue moon. This name has nothing to do with the actual color of the moon in the sky but might trace back to the time when calendar printers indicated the extra nameless full moon with blue ink. The 12 full moons with names were shown in red ink.

If a blue moon in August isn’t unusual enough, here’s the kicker: both the green corn moon and the blue moon this year occur when the moon is at its perigee point, or closest point to Earth. That qualifies both full moons as super moons. A super moon appears about 14% larger and 30% brighter than a mini moon, which occurs when the full moon is farthest from Earth. Will you be able to tell that the blue moon looks 14% larger up in the sky? Well, maybe. It would be easy if you could see a super moon and a mini moon together at the same time side by side, but that can never happen.

For information about astronomy-related events in Steamboat Springs, including public star parties at CMC’s Ball Observatory, contact physics and astronomy instructor Paul McCudden, at [email protected] or 970-870-4537 or visit the SKY Club web page at http://www.coloradomtn.edu/skyclub.

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