For the record, and to give you some conversation fodder while you're out there with that cold one, these Persieds are caused by our Earth crossing a trail of rubble left in the wake of the comet Swift-Tuttle, a name that may ring a bell because just a few years ago, around the time the comet was to return to our neighbourhood, astronomer Brian Marsden made a bit of news with a prediction that Swift-Tuttle "just might collide with the Earth in 2126":http://www.as.wvu.edu/~jel/skywatch/swfttle.html ...

But you can rest easy: with the added observations of that recent fly-by, the orbital elements were revised and refined, and the danger signal was called off.

Or at least postponed ...

bq. Marsden continued to refine his calculations, and discovered that he could trace Comet Swift-Tuttle's orbit back almost two thousand years, to match comets observed in 188 AD and possibly even 69 BC. The orbit turned out to be more stable than he had originally thought, with the effects of the comet's jets less pronounced. Marsden concluded that it is highly unlikely the comet will be 15 days off in 2126, and he called off his warning of a possible collision. His new calculations show Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass a comfortable 15 million miles from Earth on its next trip to the inner solar system. However, when Marsden ran his orbital calculations further into the future, he found that, in 3044, Comet Swift-Tuttle may pass within a million miles of Earth, a true cosmic ``near miss.''

Of course..now I just found out thatsomeone knew about this long ago....

SpaceWeather.com also reminds us that there's even more reason to get out of bed early Thursday morning (clear skies permitting):

Early Thursday morning just before dawn when the Perseid meteor shower is supposed to be most intense, Venus and the crescent moon will appear side-by-side in the eastern sky. This lovely pair would be worth waking up for even if there were no meteor shower.

Also, for the late-night hawks, towards the wee hours of Wednesday you may get a chance to see some of the spectacular Earth Grazing Perseids that skim straight across the sky.

It was an honest question, and in the case of this particular 2005 Persieds, that happens to be the case: The best show happened during the day today, and in that bare spot of clear skies last night I saw not a one before the clouds rolled over (or was that my eyelids?) -- it's cloudy now, but if there's any to be seen, try to get out and look up as soon after sundown as you can.

The why of watching meteor showers after midnight is something we all know up here in the Bruce: In a snow flurry, you see far more snowflakes coming into the front windshield of your moving car than you do out the back ... because you are driving into the storm. And so it is with meteorites, the flurry of dust particles left in the wake of a comet. As we turn past midnight, we're now looking in the direction of our planet's motion, and once the south point of sky moves past noon, yup, now you're looking behind back to where we've been.

So the storm is all around us all through the day and night, and yes, it being dark, you can more clearly see smaller particles as they flame-out, but there are meteorites in the day.