When I lived in New York it was always something of a production to catch one of the annual meteor showers. City lights and pollution drown out those wispy, fast-moving flashes, created when little particles of the cosmos incinerate in our atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. Sometimes I’d travel far upstate to get away from the glaring illumination of the metro area. One year I drove out to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, camped on the beach with friends, and gazed at meteor trails while trying to keep warm with hot toddys.

In 2002 I spent I spent a long November night, embalmed in multiple heavy wool blankets on a friend’s private lakeside dock waiting for the Leonids to appear. It was way below freezing and at around 1 am my buddies called it a night and hiked back to their cabin. I decided to tough it out, and perhaps thirty minutes later the sky exploded with a spectacular display of scores shooting stars, just for me. You have to really love stargazing to go to such lengths. These days it’s a lot easier. I just park a deck chair in my Arizona garden and mix a cocktail. Thank you Tucson Dark-Sky ordinance!

The known meteor showers take place at the same time every year, and what colorful names they have: Quadrantids, Kappa Serpentids, Lyrids, and Alpha Scorpiids, among others. The Leonids and the Perseids are the best known, as they typically produce the greatest numbers of shooting stars. The showers occur when our planet passes through trails of cometary debris. Every August we encounter a cloud of tiny fragments of ice and rock left drifting in space by Swift-Tuttle—a periodic comet that reappeared in the night sky in 1992 after an absence of 130 years.

Although the meteors we see every August originated from Comet Swift-Tuttle’s icy heart, they appear—as a result of an optical illusion—to emanate from the constellation Perseus, hence their name: the Perseids. The annual showers do not produce meteorites (any part of a meteor that survives and makes it to the earth) as the meteor-producing fragments burn up in the air. But don’t worry, somebody calls us every year to tell us they found one of the Perseids in their driveway and it’ll happen again this year, for sure.

Perseid meteors can be seen from early August well to the middle of the month. The period of maximum activity, or peak, is expected to occur during the night of August 11 and into the morning of August 12. Typically, the later it gets, the greater the number of visible meteors, with the largest number often occurring a few hours before dawn. If you are eager and dedicated enough to stay up into the wee hours, it should be possible to see one or more shooting stars per minute.

The Perseids hit our atmosphere at an extremely high speed—an incredible 130,000 miles per hour! The resulting trails are particularly bright, and sometimes vapor can be seen hanging in the air for a few seconds after a shooting star has burned up.

The best way to observe the Perseids is to find an area with dark skies and no distractions, and recline in a comfortable chair so you can view as much of the sky as possible. After midnight, the constellation of Perseus will be in the northeast for observers in Arizona. Turn off the lights, kick back, treat yourself to a favorite tipple, and watch the skies. It’s the greatest show not on this earth, it is absolutely free, and completely devoid of commercial interruption. Stellar.

NBC’s Meteor miniseries concluded this past Sunday night. Of course, being a meteorite specialist I absolutely had to watch it. Meteor is, in the loosest sense, a vague remake of the 1979 big budget disaster epic of the same name. The ’70s feature came in thin on science but big on human stars (not shooting stars), with a cast that included Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard and Henry Fonda.

The thing that surprised me most about the new NBC series was not the blatant disregard for scientific accuracy (I expect that from science fiction meteor/meteorite shows), but rather that it was just a lame made-for-TV-series with a few short bits of meteor mayhem thrown in from time to time. A number of tired sub plots including kidnapping, a rape attempt, evil cops, drug smugglers in Mexico, a collapsed hospital, missing family members, and the good-sheriff-battling-the-violent-hillbilly-guy took up most of the four hours of air time. Well, actually NBC is so awash with dismal commercials that the air time of the program itself was probably less than three hours.

Kooky Christopher Lloyd receives high billing, but he gets done away with early on, so don’t expect to see much of him. I think Jason Alexander is a terrific actor, but he is disappointing in this show as a stressed-out scientist trying help the US government and military destroy a shower of meteoric debris headed for Earth.

So, the show was bad, but what about the science? Well, let’s get something very clear: meteorites are not hot and smoking when they crash into the ground. As meteors blaze through our atmosphere they heat up and burn for a short period of time—at high altitude. After a few seconds, atmospheric pressure slows them down and the meteor’s flame goes out. This will happen several miles above our planet’s surface. The meteor then continues to fall in what is called dark flight, at a much slower speed. The air up there is cold, so meteors have plenty of time to cool down. When they land on Earth’s surface they are cold, or slightly warm to the touch. Not spitting flame “as seen on TV.”

In Meteor, when we see soldiers running onto rooftops to shoot down incoming smoking meteors with Stinger missiles, it is just nonsense. We also get to enjoy scenes where scientists periodically jump up in the command center and shriek something along the lines of: “Oh my god, the next small ones are going to land in Boise!” or wherever. A typical meteor might enter our atmosphere at about 17,000 miles per hour with no notice. You could not spot a small incoming meteor in advance, out there in space, with radar or telescope, and then predict where it is going to land. Too far away, too fast, too small a target, and then there is that pesky interference of atmosphere and wind as well.

Incredibly enough, Meteor is already slated for a DVD release. TVShowsOnDVD.com claims you should “Get ready for heart-pounding action, incredible special effects and edge-of-your-seat suspense!” Are writers still using those phrases “heart-pounding action,” and “edge-of-your-seat suspense”? Really? I don’t know which is a worse cliché, the miniseries or the review.

Anyway, I am spending far too much time on this. Meteor was useless except for a few excellent CGI shots of the meteor swarm approaching Earth, and I do get that it’s not always all about the science. I love a good story and am fine taking a few liberties with the facts if it makes for a better action movie. For example, in scientific terms Armageddon—another meteor/meteorite disaster flick—is so full of holes a colony of pack rats could happily live in it for decades, but it is a hugely entertaining film. Nonesuch with Meteor.

As soon as we get a really good meteorite epic, I promise to be the first to let you know about it. In the meantime, if you wish to truly experience the wonder and mystery of stones that have come to visit us from outer space, you must read Christopher Cokinos’ excellent new book: The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. I shall be reviewing that for you in very short order.

In the meantime . . . watch the skies!

I do not have any children of my own, and the chances of me generating any are about the same as the human race developing a faster-than-light starship drive in my lifetime. That fact that I chose not to procreate doesn’t mean I don’t care about the younger generation.

When I was about six years old, a jolly and friendly geologist, built like a bull and named Wally Robbins, took me under his wing during one of our family vacations to the US. He gave me my first trilobite fossil (I went on to find some spectacular specimens in later life, but I still have that first little Elrathia kingii and still treasure it) and some lovely rocks and minerals. I watched him walk the beaches and rivers of New England at low tide, collecting rocks. His wife joked that the only exercise he ever got was when he bent down to pick up something of geological interest.

Were it not for Wally, I may never have followed my path into the world of scientific adventure and exploration. I remember how inspiring he was to me and—in my own small way—I try to pass it along.

Yesterday, I had the very great honor of participating in the Lunar and Planetary Lab‘s Apollo 11 40th Anniversary celebration. My staff and I set up a display of rare and unusual meteorites, as did several of our professional colleagues. I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting astronomer Thomas Bopp, co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp “the most widely observed comet of the twentieth century.” I also got to spend time with John Terry White, an aerospace expert and president of White Eagle Aerospace, and a most charming and fascinating man. Scott Schneewels astounded me with his collection of genuine Apollo mission historic artifacts, including a control panel from an actual Lunar Module, hand-woven memory from one of the command modules, and tools designed to collect and transport moon rocks.

I was afraid that all of this “science stuff” might be a little dry for the scores of kids who were in attendance, and who were born more than thirty years after the Eagle touched down at Tranquility Base. There was no chance of that. We gave away small meteorites with identification cards, all day long, to wide-eyed children who were enthralled to hold something from outer space. And we distributed free DVDs, magazines, and postcards about meteorites and answered a million questions: “How does the Earth know there isn’t life on other planets?” (Well, that was a tough one)

If one of those kids decides to devote his or her life to aerospace, or meteoritics, or some other important scientific discipline, then we really are leaving something worthwhile behind. With budget cuts in research and education resulting in tragedies like the wonderful Flandrau Planetarium remaining closed for five days out of every seven, those of us who care about the future must take up the slack in other ways.

Photographs by Leigh Anne DelRay, Callisto Images © Leigh Anne DelRay, all rights reserved.