Perseid Meteor Shower to Peak Tonight

Around this time each year, we are gifted with one of the more active meteor showers of the year. The Perseid’s build through the early portions of August, and come to a peak sometime within the mid-August time frame. Well, that much anticipated peak happens to fall tonight!

And, it is predicted to be one of the larger meteor showers that we have seen in quite sometime. According to EarthSky, the peak is forecast to be up to, “…200 meteors per hours on the peak night.” That peak is tonight, but there have already been some incredible pictures taken around the country of Perseid meteors.

Ahead of peak of #PerseidMeteorShower early Fri, our cameras caught a few last night & got a fix on Polaris. #wawx pic.twitter.com/IHkeuDJXlf

— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) August 11, 2016

Early morning Perseid 8-10-16 #coachellavalley #coachella #astronomy #astrophotography #PerseidMeteorShower pic.twitter.com/jYftRm3oGt

— Coachella Valley (@CV_Astronomy) August 11, 2016

So, what can we expect weather-wise for this evening? Well, as we have advertised pretty heavily on WxOrNotBG, we are under the influence of a tropical air mass, and this has had an impact on our overall cloudiness and storm chances over the past few days. Luckily this evening, showers look to be dying down/moving out of the region, setting us up for an evening that shouldn’t be full of clouds.

The rain showers (depicted by the HRRR model) look to move out this evening. h/t COD Weather

Cloud cover looks fairly minimal overnight! h/t COD Weather

We will likely see some clouds during the overnight hours, but during the peak meteor viewing times, we should be able to squeeze some meteor sights out! Go to a dark place, with little surrounding lights and just watch. The peak times will be around and after midnight until about dawn.