Tonight, you can admire shooting stars in the sky. They number in the thousands during this period and the peak is for this Thursday evening. To best observe this celestial spectacle, try to move away from the lights of cities and villages.
“Look then over the entire surface of the sky, you shouldn’t aim for a single point. With a deckchair or even lying on the ground with a blanket, you have to look carefully because if you raise your head all the time, at the end , we will have a torticollis”, advises Dominique Gering, educational coordinator of the Eurospace Center in Transinne.
According to this specialist, the particularity this year is that the moon will be present. “We are almost in the full moon phase. Which means that it will be difficult to see the faintest shooting stars. But we are still counting on what are called bolides, meteors that arrive at very high speed. They will far exceed the luminosity of the moon. So we will be able to see them”, insure Dominique Gering.
These shooting stars are in fact dust left in the trail of the comet Swift-Tuttle which ignites while returning at full speed in the atmosphere. A cloud of dust the size of a grain of sand, and these ignite on contact with the atmosphere. They are called the Perseids, from the constellation of Perseus. We can observe between 70 and 110 shooting stars per hour.
And if you want to observe them up close with professional equipment, you can go to the Eurospace Center where many free activities are organized from 3:30 p.m.