Mother Nature's Light Shows

Canadian skies will be streaked with hundreds of meteors Sunday evening as the annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak.

The month-long natural light show began on July 17, but it is this weekend that sky watchers will be most eagerly scouring the heavens.

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada is predicting 100 meteors an hour will burn trails across the atmosphere, starting about midnight Sunday night and lasting until the first light of dawn on Monday.

And the added bonus of having a new moon at the same time means there will not be any bright moonlight to spoil the spectacular, which can be easily seen with the naked eye.

Around the start of our year count, 2000 years ago, comet Kiess passed the sun and ejected a cloud of dust. Kiess completed one orbit in 1911 when it was discovered by Lick Observatory post-doc Carl Kiess. The dust took longer to return, and formed a continuous stream of dust particles that has been passing just outside Earth orbit ever since.

On Sept. 1, 2007, that trail of dust from Roman times will wander in the Earth's path again, causing an extremely rare meteor shower during the short time it takes the Earth to travel through the stream of dust. The meteors radiate from the constellation of Auriga, and are called Aurigids. Only three people alive today are known to have seen this shower before in 1935, 1986, and 1994. After the 2007 encounter, the Aurigids will not be seen again in our lifetimes.