Meteor showers are an opportunity to get outside, gaze at the night sky and watch as so-called “shooting stars” flash across the heavens.
But those streaks of light we see are neither shooting, nor stars, says WUWM Astronomy Contributor Jean Creighton. They’re meteors — fragments of comets and asteroids that burn up and emit light as they enter Earth’s atmosphere.
Creighton is the director at UWM’s Manfred Olson Planetarium, where you can do some stargazing and learn more about meteors during this month’s “Shooting Stars” program. You can catch that program on Fridays this month, starting July 10. Ahead of that, Creighton joined Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski to clear up some misconceptions about asteroids, comets, meteors and more.
Creighton says peak meteor shower season is coming up around Aug. 11-12. During that peak, you can see around 50 meteors an hour, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. But she says they can also be seen year-round.
“You can see about five an hour any time of year,” Creighton says. “But at certain times a year, because our Earth crosses a known comet orbit, we have a much higher chance of seeing shooting stars. And that's what we call a meteor shower.”
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