Celestial bodies Good conditions for observing shooting stars

The conditions for observing shooting stars are particularly good this year. Until August 15, the Perseids meteor shower is one of the highlights in the sky. Many municipalities therefore switch off their public lighting at night.

The highest probability of observations is on the night of August 12 to 13 - i.e. from Monday to Tuesday next week. The private weather service Meteonews wrote this in a blog post. Between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. in particular, up to one hundred shooting stars per hour can be seen, at least in theory.

According to experts, the Perseids are a meteor shower that peaks every year in August. At this time of year, the Earth is immersed in a cloud of debris as it orbits the sun. These come from the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, named after the two astronomers who discovered it in 1862.

The dust particles hit the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 59 kilometers per second and evaporate at an altitude of around one hundred kilometers. The shooting summer stars take their name from the constellation Perseus. This is the apparent starting point of the Perseid meteors.

The moon also plays its part

This year, the weather is also playing its part, writes Meteonews. During the nights, the sky is only slightly cloudy or even clear. The half moon is also not a problem because it sets in the southwest before midnight. Although it brightens the horizon for a while, most of the sky is already dark.

A number of municipalities have decided to switch off their public lighting on Tuesday night to make the shooting stars more visible - particularly in the canton of Vaud.

According to the Projet Perséides association based in Orbe VD, public lighting will be switched off completely or partially in 251 municipalities in French-speaking Switzerland and the German-speaking part of the canton of Fribourg during the night from Monday to Tuesday. That is 34 more municipalities than last year.

The Projet Perséides, which was founded in 2019, arose from the observation that artificial lighting obscures the sky. The Milky Way itself had become almost invisible, as had the shooting star showers.

However, the night sky and darkness are of scientific, cultural, ecological and spiritual importance, according to the association. This gave rise to the plan to give the night back to Europeans once a year on a fixed date, namely August 12, the peak of the shooting star showers.

According to Projet Perséides, the association does not yet have sufficient resources to involve communities in German-speaking Switzerland and Ticino. However, this is set to change in the coming years, according to a request from the Keystone-SDA news agency.

SDA