Perseids reach peak: hundreds of shooting stars per hour

As soon as the solar eclipse was over on Wednesday evening, the sky offered another spectacle: the Perseids, one of the most beautiful meteor showers of the year, reached its peak during the night. You should see up to a hundred meteors per hour streaking across the sky in dark places. This year, people who wanted to get rid of a lot of wishes had it particularly easy. Because the maximum of the Perseids fell exactly on the night of the new moon. No moonlight interfered with spotting the luminous phenomena and the weather largely cooperated. According to the German Weather Service (DWD), there were only a few high cloud fields over northern Germany. There could have been local clouding of visibility, said a DWD meteorologist. Many people consider shooting stars to be classic lucky charms that are said to make wishes come true. Even in Berlin, shooting stars could be seen before 11 p.m. that night. Despite the light pollution, some have already been observed, said the director of the Zeiss Large Planetarium, Tim Florian Horn, to the German press agency dpa. Next to the planetarium, guests watched the spectacle directly in an open area. “Every star scale is admired with loud ahs and ohs,” said Horn. The Perseids could already be observed on the nights before their maximum. Many can still be seen in the next few nights if the weather is good, said Horn. The curve slowly flattens and ends on August 24th. Comet loses substance The Perseids have their origin in comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The Earth crosses the stream of tiny dust particles left behind by the comet as it orbits the sun. When the particles enter the Earth's atmosphere, they burn up. With a penetration speed of around 60 kilometers per second, the Perseids are quite fast meteors. Some of them, as so-called fireballs, can even reach the brightness of Venus. Look towards the northeast As the name suggests, the shooting stars seem to come from the constellation Perseus - after dark this lies above the northeastern horizon. Perseus is a mythological hero from ancient Greece.