Perseid Outburst at Westmeath Lookout
Perseid Outburst at Westmeath Lookout
This year an outburst of Perseid meteors surprised skywatchers.
The reliable meteor shower's peak was predicted for the night of August 12/13. But persistent visual observers in North America were deluged with a startling Perseid shower outburst a day later, with reports of multiple meteors per minute and sometimes per second in the early hours of August 14.
The shower radiant is high in a dark night sky in this composite image. It painstakingly registers the trails of 282 Perseids captured during the stunning outburst activity between 0650 UT (02:50am EDT) and 0900 UT (05:00am EDT) on August 14 from Westmeath Lookout, Ontario.
Of course the annual Perseid meteor shower is associated with planet Earth's passage through dusty debris from periodic comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
The 2021 outburst could have been caused by an unanticipated encounter with the Perseid Filament, a denser ribbon of dust inside the broader debris zone.
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