A Shower of Light

By SUZAN BELLINCAMPI

On the Vineyard, the stars come out at night.

I am not hoping for a Carly sighting or a sneak peek at Ted and Mary or Hillary and Bill, but I would be quite content with a clear, cloudless night.

It is not only the stars that I seek. Along with them are many other heavenly bodies of fame and notoriety. Of these, there are some that are even less common than an Island celebrity sighting.

A once-a-year event will occur this weekend, and you shouldn’t miss it. The annual Perseid meteor shower will bathe us in streams of light. This show promises to be a good one, especially since there will be a new moon, so the sky will be dark. Of the Perseid meteor shower, the scientific gossip columnists are saying that is will be “spectacular, above-average, a good year, and a great show.” Hopes are high and there is promise (or meteor bits) in the air.

The best day to see the meteor shower is on Sunday, August 12, from 11 p.m. to dawn, but look skyward from Friday night until Monday because you may be able to catch a meteor during all of these nights. At the height of the event, one can see a meteor fly by once a minute or more, with up to 100 an hour possible. These meteors are no slowpokes either, clocking in at about 342,000 miles per hour.

What we see during a meteor shower are often called shooting stars, but the falling or shooting streaks of light are not stars at all. Stars are gaseous bodies, not solid like these comet droppings. (Not to mention the fact that stars are usually thousands of times larger than the Earth.)

Meteor showers occur when comets shed icy, dusty debris, called dross, along their orbit and the Earth travels through that dusty orbit. The place from which the meteors originate is called the radiant, and the comet from which the Perseids come is the Swift-Tuttle. As the dust enters the earth’s atmosphere, it is burned up, producing light and heat.

Comets are objects that streak through space and glow while still outside the Earth’s atmosphere; meteors are chunks of debris that glow because of the friction they encounter while falling through our atmosphere. If they manage to make it all the way to the ground, they are called meteorites.

Since the meteors appear to fall from the constellation Perseus, this August shower is called the Perseid meteor shower. Of course I can’t resist the temptation to tell you the scoop on Perseus, the namesake of the constellation for whom the meteor shower is named. Perseus was a Greek hero that slew the serpent-haired maiden Medea whose modus operandi was to turn all who visited her into stone —not very hospitable by any standards. Even in mythology, stars had their run-ins with the Medea.

As for the time of year when the meteor recurs, the Perseids memorialize the season when the Greek god Zeus, who was the father of Perseus, visited Danae, Perseus’s mortal mother, in a shower of gold to win her affections. Perseus was the result of this successful courtship.

The Perseid meteor showers have been seen for more than 2,000 years.

In Europe, they were known as the Tears of St. Laurence, named for Laurentius, who was martyred by the Romans in 258. The Romans spared him no mercy when they roasted him alive over an open fire. He never lost his sense of humor, and was quoted as saying “I am already roasted on one side and, if thou wouldst have me well cooked, it is time to turn me on the other.” When his family took his body, there were bright streaks falling from the sky. They took these to be his fiery tears from heaven.

This weekend will be the right time to get out and look for the stars. Who knows, perhaps Carly, Bill and Hillary, and Ted and Mary will be somewhere on the Island also watching the famous show.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of

the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary

in Edgartown.

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