To do this weekend: watch the Perseid meteor shower

The brightest planets of the solar system are lining up right in the middle of this year's Perseid meteor shower display. The action peaks on the night of August 12. Meteor rates of up to 100 per hour are expected. More details on how to watch them here.

* Note: NBC plans to delay them by 4 hours.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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http://twitter.com/MrWeeble James Hardy

If only I didn’t live in a city where the sky never gets darker than orange
charming.quark

How awesome would it be, though, if NBC really did air meteor showers in the middle of the night?
http://www.kmoser.com kmoser

“Oh my God, it’s full of stars.”
GawainLavers

* Note: NBC plans to delay them by 4 hours.

Hah! And lock NASA’s twitter account.
http://twitter.com/AndBobando ando bobando

The last time we had a great meteor shower, I camped out to watch in the backyard with my better half, and the whole thing was just so magical and romantic that we topped it off with a romp under the stars! So I guess my point is… meteor showers rock! :P
hubs

A beginners guide to viewing the Perseid meteor shower this weekend.

http://www.artifacting.com/2010/08/beginners-guide-to-viewing-the-persied-meteor-shower/
mcarlson

Ha! I live in Michigan, which routinely schedules pouring rain and cloud cover on such nights. “Watch the meteor shower” they said. Ha!
Preston Sturges

I only get good weather about once every 15 years for this. Last time was around 2002 and it was cloudy. But it looked promising at midnight and I drove up county to my spot. At its peak there were several a second. There was also a Space Station flyover scheduled and I kept squinting at satellites wondering which one it was. But when it came it looked as big as a bus! Driving home at dawn with the commuter traffic I saw one last meteorite against a clear blue sky.
NikFromNYC

“Now, I beg, apply your mind to true reasoning. For a mightily new thing is labouring to fall upon your ears, a new aspect of creation to show itself. But nothing is there so easy that at first it is not more difficult to believe, nothing again so great or so wonderful that all men do not by degrees abate their wonder at it. In the first place, consider the clear and pure colour of the sky, and all that it contains – the travelling constellations, the moon, and the bright light of the dazzling sun; if all these were now revealed for the first time to mortals, if they were thrown before them suddenly without preparation, what more wonderful than these things could be named, or such as the nations would have less dared to believe beforehand? Nothing, as I think: so wondrous this spectacle would have been. Yet think how all are so wearied with satiety of seeing it that no one now thinks it worth while to look up toward the bright vault of heaven! Forbear then to be dismayed by mere novelty.” – Lucretius
(“On the Nature of Things”~ 60 BC)
theman

Wait…..so you’re telling me that thousands of space rocks are hurtling in the general direction of Earth and a bunch of planets are lining up right in the middle of it in 2012? Oh noes.
http://profiles.google.com/kendig.j.l J K

I finally went out to see a meteor shower and even managed to drag along girlfriend. This was something neither of us had ever done before, and it was pretty cool. The whole adventure from finding a good spot to observe on this website:

http://www.blue-marble.de/nightlights/2010

to setting up a nice spot for us to lay down (tarp/cushions/blanket) it was cool little ordeal.

I’ll definitely be doing something like this again soon.

Thanks to BoingBoing for bringing it to my attention!