Tonight offers a good reason to look up. The Perseids, a prolific meteor shower that dazzles every summer, is expected to peak, with as many as 100 meteoroids – or “shootings stars” – visible per hour from nightfall on August 12 until dawn on August 13. Read on for our complete guide to Britain’s darkest skies, where you’ll have the best chance of sightings, plus expert stargazing tips.
Britain is an island of star-seekers. We love gazing at the night sky, marvelling at countless glimmering pin-pricks whose light has travelled for hundreds – or even, in the case of the Andromeda Galaxy, millions – of years to reach our tiny planet. Celestial spectacles have rendered Britons slack-jawed for millennia.
, it’s claimed, may have been constructed 4,500 years ago as a Neolithic astronomical observatory. The Covid pandemic, restricting our movements during a spell of fortuitously clear skies, lit a rocket under . “Lockdown was incredible for getting people outside, looking up at the stars,” says Chris Bramley, editor of BBC .
“We saw a 128 per cent increase in new subscribers in 2020, and a 250 per cent rise in website visitors.” When freedom returned, staycations offered opportunities to discover the joys of domestic stargazing. “Perhaps it’s not surprising that UK stargazing breaks are becoming popular,” adds Dr Ed Bloomer, astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich.
“Some of it is good old capitalism, creating something from literally nothing – .