THE TRICK TO SEEING PERSEID METEORS: The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight, Aug. 12-13. Bright moonlight will interfere with its visibility, though. What's the trick for seeing a good show? Wake up early--very early--about an hour before sunrise when the Moon is low and the shower's radiant is high in the sky. Forecasters expect dozens of Perseids per hour to streak across the briefly-dark predawn sky.
Jan Curtis woke up early this morning in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and caught 4 bright Perseids falling over his neighborhood:
"I started observing at 2:45 AM," says Curtis. "The sky darkened a lot after the Moon set at 3:19 AM. The brightest meteor was recorded as dawn was breaking."
If you don't want to wake up before sunrise, watch this live webcast from Morocco, instead. It's about to start!
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SAUCER-SHAPED 'SPACE LIGHTNING': For years, Frankie Lucena of Puerto Rico has been monitoring the skies above thunderstorms in the Caribbean. His cameras frequently capture images of exotic 'space lightning'--strange forms that lance upward from the electrical tempest below. Most often he sees sprites; occasionally he catches a gigantic jet. On Aug. 6th he photographed one of the rarest forms of all, the elusive ELVE:
"This ELVE appeared over a storm just south of Puerto Rico at 3:47am local time," says Lucena. "It is, essentially, a donut of red light 300 to 400 km wide."
First seen by cameras on the space shuttle in 1990, ELVEs appear when a pulse of electromagnetic radiation from cloud-to-ground lightning propagates up toward space and hits the base of Earth's ionosphere. A faint ring of deep-red light marks the 'spot' where the EMP hits.
"For this to happen, the lightning needs to be very strong--typically 150-350 kilo-Ampères," says Oscar van der Velde, a member of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "For comparison, normal cloud-to-ground flashes only reach 10-30 kA."
ELVEs are elusive--and that's an understatement. Blinking in and out of existence in only 1/1000th of a second, they are completely invisible to the human eye. For comparison, red sprites tend to last for hundredths of a second and regular lightning can scintillate for a second or more. Their brevity explains why ELVEs are a more recent discovery than other lightning-related phenomenon.
Learn more about the history and physics of ELVEs here and here.
APOLLO 11 PROOF SILVER DOLLARS: The students of Earth to Sky Calculus weren't even born when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in 1969 years ago. Nevertheless, they "get it." On July 20th, the students launched 50 Apollo 11 silver dollars to the stratosphere onboard a cosmic ray balloon. The coins touched the edge of space 50 years to the day after Neil and Buzz made footprints in the Sea of Tranquillity:
You can have one for $197.95. The students are selling these coins to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Quantities are limited and more than half have already been sold. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the item in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
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All sales support hands-on STEM education
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