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Perseids Meteor Shower 2012: Peak Time and Places to Watch in and around Fridley

The meteor shower will be at its best Saturday and Sunday. Where can you try to see the Perseids Meteor Shower in town or driving distance from Fridley?

The Perseids Meteor Shower 2012 can work for you as a cheap date night, especially since it peaks in Fridley on Saturday night and into Sunday morning—if you can find a place to actually see it.

Fridley is close enough to the Twin Cities' urban centers for light-pollution to impede star- or meteor-gazing. (See a light pollution map of Minnesota at the Minnesota Astronomical Society's web page.)

might be the darkest spot in town. The visitors center building closes at 9 p.m. Friday and earlier Saturday and Sunday, "but the outside park/parking lot is open," said Springbrook's Jan Swanson by email Friday. "We have no closing gates." To get to the darkest area, she said, "head into the center part of the park."

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If you're willing to get behind the wheel to see a meteor, the Onan Observatory at Baylor Regional Park in Norwood Young America, MN (about an hour from Fridley), will host a viewing party. The University of Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics hosts "Universe in the Park" events this Friday and Saturday at state parks north and south of the metro area. And the Minnesota Astronomical Society lists several other facilities in the region suitable for seeing the night sky.

The Anoka Hennepin School District's Jackson Middle School observatory in Champlin (closed for the summer) says this about Saturday:

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The Perseid meteor shower should be at its best tonight. The Moon doesn’t rise until the wee hours of the morning, so it won’t spread much light to overpower the show. The Moon will line up between the dazzling planets Venus and Jupiter.

More about Meteors
If the clouds cooperate (by staying away), you can see the annual meteor shower any night this week. Space.com tells us these objects are tiny bits of rock and debris from an old comet, which is named Swift-Tuttle after the astronomers who discovered it in 1862.

The shower splashes through the sky every year in early August when Earth passes through the comet Swift-Tuttle's orbit and sweeps up some of this debris. We see shooting stars—rapid streaks of light—as the tiny rocks encounter the thin upper atmosphere of the Earth and the air is heated to incandescence.

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For the geeks among us, here's some trivia: The Perseids get their name from Perseus, the constellation from which they seem to emanate, but they can appear anywhere in the sky. Their only connection with Perseus is that, if you trace their path backward across the sky, eventually you get to Perseus.

You can see the shower anywhere in the sky, but look toward the southeastern sky to see the meteors at their brightest and longest.

This bit of advice from Space.com

If you don't see any meteors at first, be patient. This is a meteor shower, not a meteor storm. There will be a lot more meteors than you would see on a normal night, but they will still only come at random intervals, perhaps 20 or 30 in an hour.

When you do see a meteor, it will likely be very fast and at the edge of your field of vision. You may even doubt that what you saw was real. But, when you do see something, watch that area more closely, as two or three meteors often come in groups down the same track.


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