Watch the Perseid rain without leaving home 0:52
(CNN Spanish) --
The Perseid shower, the most anticipated space show of the year, will be overshadowed in 2022 by the brightness of the full moon.
Seeing the meteors will be more difficult, but not impossible.
The rain will peak on August 12 and 13, according to NASA.
The meteorites will start to wane the following days and will disappear completely by September 1st.
The exact peak will be around 09:00 pm Miami time on Friday night the 12th, but that is not the best time to see the expected shower, according to the American Meteor Society.
In fact, early evening is the worst time to try to observe them because the radiant—the direction the meteors appear to be coming from—is low in the sky and most of the show is beyond the field of view. .
(Anyway, the ones you do see at that time are special because they skim the upper regions of the atmosphere and last longer than the ones seen toward dawn. Many of these will be seen low in the east or west, traveling north to south).
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As you approach midnight, when the radiant is highest, the passage of meteors will last for tenths of a second.
At these times, most of the activity is still happening beyond your field of vision.
The best time, theoretically, is just before sunrise, when the radiant is at its highest point in the dark sky, explains the US institution.
From 03:00 am to 04:00 am would be the best time, according to the testimony of observers collected by the institution, even better than the following hour.
But in this assessment, the fatigue of those who spend all night waiting to see the meteors may also play a role.
Where to look, especially with the full moon in between?
"Sadly, this year's Perseid peak will be under the worst possible circumstances for observers," said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.
"Most of us in North America would normally see 50 or 60 meteors an hour," he explained, but this year the figure will drop to a range of 10 to 20 "at best."
Why this year we will not see the Perseids in all its splendor?
1:02
With the moonlight interfering, it's wise to aim your gaze toward the "middle" of the sky, says the American Meteor Society.
In other words: don't look directly up, focus at a lower height where there is more activity.
Is it better to look towards the radiant or towards the opposite direction?
There are those who prefer the first option to see how the meteors move in all directions.
The downside is that they are shorter.
If you look in the opposite direction you will see longer meteors.
This year, several observatories join forces to make an online transmission of the rain that you can see on the page skylights.tv.
What are the Perseids?
For 2,000 years, the Perseids have put on a scintillating spectacle, according to NASA.
Comet Swift-Tuttle orbits the Sun once every 133 years, so every August, Earth passes through the comet's debris field.
Ice and dust, accumulated over 1,000 years, burn up in our atmosphere to create the meteor shower.
The Perseids show brighter meteors than any other annual meteor shower.
Meteorite, meteor, meteoroid, asteroid, comet: what's the difference?
Meteors can be traced to the Perseus constellation, from which they get their name.
The meteors themselves travel at 212,000 kilometers per hour, which creates their vivid beams of light.
They can reach between 1,600 and 5,500 degrees Celsius during that rain.
The comet itself will come extremely close to Earth in 2126.
With information from Ashley Strickland.
Perseids