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5 min readHow to see the year's best meteor shower tonight
The Perseid meteor shower peaked on a Wednesday night with a new moon, creating the darkest possible skies for viewing — and the hosts of NPR's Short Wave wanted to make sure listeners knew exactly what they were looking at and why it matters. But the episode also covered two other space stories: a new ultra-high-resolution view of the sun's surface, and a SpaceX rocket part that recently crashed into the moon.
The Perseids: Earth runs into a comet's leftovers
Meteor showers happen when Earth, on its annual orbit around the sun, passes through debris trails left by comets. For the Perseids, that comet is Swift-Tuttle. The "shooting stars" are tiny fragments — most about the size of a grain of sand — burning up in Earth's atmosphere. "That itself is pretty impressive, that this little thing burning up in our atmosphere is putting on such a big show," said co-host Regina Barber.
The Perseids were first recorded in 36 A.D. by the Han dynasty in ancient China, according to Matt Shindell, a planetary science historian at the Smithsonian. But it wasn't until the mid-1800s that astronomers began connecting meteor showers to comets.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:38) **Perseid Meteor Shower: What It Is and How to See It** - The segment opens with the basics of the Perseid meteor shower, which peaked the night before recording.
- 2 (07:13) **New High-Resolution Images of the Sun's Surface** - Researchers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii have published stunning new images of the sun’s surface at a resolution of about 12 miles.
- 3 (10:15) **SpaceX Rocket Part Crashes Into the Moon** - A piece of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched in January 2025, unintentionally hit the moon on August 5th.
- 4 Standout Quotes
- 5 (03:01) "It confirmed something that's out there. Yeah, like those pictures weren't lying." — Scott describing the moment he saw Saturn through a telescope for the first time.
- 6 (09:31) "I feel like it's almost more exciting to me sometimes when scientists confirm factually something that was long theorized... because somebody thought about something, they had no idea if it was actually true, and it turns out it is." — Scott on the value of confirming theoretical predictions, like the solar surface instabilities.
- 7 (11:29) "One person's junk is another person's treasure. That's scientists. Love things hitting the moon." — Brett Denevi, a lunar scientist, on the SpaceX rocket crash.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
We dive into those questions on this edition of Spacing Out, which also gets into the latest news about the Sun and the tea behind the SpaceX rocket crashing into the moon.
Interested in more space news? Let us know! Email us your question at [email protected].
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