The first time Bill Cooke ever saw a meteor shower, he was 11 years old in the woods of North Georgia getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes. But as he looked up, the sight of color streaks from the Perseid meteor shower made him forget his itchy red bumps — if only for a moment. Now Cooke, 66, is the meteroid environment program manager at NASA in Huntsville, Ala.
, where he studies the skies for a living. And he said it is just as easy for him to witness the meteor shower at its mid-August zenith as it was 55 years ago — and for you too, if you follow a few simple rules. The meteor shower is a debris train trailing the Swift-Tuttle comet, a dirty snowball that completes its orbit around the sun every 133 years.
From mid-July to early September, the Earth’s orbital path around the sun crosses that of the comet. And those grain-sized debris become “falling stars” as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, burning up and producing spectacular streaks of light. The fascination with the Perseids dates back centuries.
Scribes in medieval Europe called the meteor shower “the tears of St. Lawrence” because the streaks in the sky fell on the anniversary of St. Lawrence’s martyrdom.
A more recent example comes from the late singer and songwriter John Denver, whose hit “Rocky Mountain High” (“I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky”) was based on a camping trip he took to see the Perseids. Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, said the Perse.