When the view was clear, one could admire a sky spectacle at night: up to 100 shooting stars burned up every hour.
Hamburg / Offenbach – On Friday night, hundreds of Perseid shooting stars burned up over Germany.
Especially on the Schleswig-Holstein Baltic Sea coast and over Rügen, the conditions were good to observe the glowing meteor shower, as a meteorologist from the German Weather Service (DWD) said in Offenbach on Friday. There were hardly any disturbing clouds there at the beginning of the night. In Eastern Bavaria, too, the view of the night sky was mostly clear. According to the Hamburg Planetarium, up to 100 shooting stars burned up at a height of 80 to 100 kilometers per hour.
Over the big cities, however, the spectacle appeared much weaker. “The problem is light pollution,” said a spokeswoman for the planetarium. Even a hazy sky or fog can thwart the stargazers’ plans. “A very light cloud of veil is enough – and it’s game over,” said the spokeswoman. It had a positive effect that the waxing moon set between 10:30 p.m. over East Germany and 10:50 p.m. over West Germany. This made the sky look darker.
The Perseids appear to come from the constellation Perseus, but they are a cloud of debris from comet 109P / Swift-Tuttle that the earth plunges into each year as it orbits the sun. The comet was discovered in 1862 and takes around 133 years to orbit the sun. The next time it should be visible from Earth in the year 2126. According to the planetarium, what burns up in the earth’s atmosphere are crumbs of the comet that it loses in its orbit. Every August, the earth crosses this cosmic debris trail, and the cometary particles fall onto the atmosphere. dpa
