                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

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                              2021 September 24

                    Perseid Outburst at Westmeath Lookout
                   Image Credit & Copyright: Pierre Martin

   Explanation: This year an outburst of Perseid meteors surprised
   skywatchers. The reliable meteor shower's peak was predicted for the
   night of August 12/13. But persistent visual observers in North America
   were deluged with a startling Perseid shower outburst a day later, with
   reports of multiple meteors per minute and sometimes per second in the
   early hours of August 14. The shower radiant is high in a dark night
   sky in this composite image. It painstakingly registers the trails of
   282 Perseids captured during the stunning outburst activity between
   0650 UT (02:50am EDT) and 0900 UT (05:00am EDT) on August 14 from
   Westmeath Lookout, Ontario. Of course the annual Perseid meteor shower
   is associated with planet Earth's passage through dusty debris from
   periodic comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The 2021 outburst could have been
   caused by an unanticipated encounter with the Perseid Filament, a
   denser ribbon of dust inside the broader debris zone.

             Tomorrow's picture: The Bubble and the Star Cluster
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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