Persaid History :: essays research papers

Perseid History This is the most famous of all meteor showers. It never fails to provide an impressive display and, due to its summertime appearance, it tends to provide the majority of meteors seen by non-astronomy enthusiasts. The earliest record of its activity appears in the Chinese annals, where it is said that in 36 AD "more than 100 meteors flew thither in the morning." Numerous references appear in Chinese, Japanese and Korean records throughout the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, but only sporadic references are found between the 12th and 19th centuries, inclusive. Nevertheless, August has long had a reputation for an abundance of meteors. The Perseids have been referred to as the "tears of St. Lawrence", since meteors seemed to be in abundance during the festival of that saint on August 10th, but credit for the discovery of the shower's annual appearance is given to Quà ©telet (Brussels), who, in 1835, reported that there was a shower occurring in August that emanated from the constellation Perseus. The first observer to provide an hourly count for this shower was Eduard Heis (Mà ¼nster), who found a maximum rate of 160 meteors per hour in 1839. Observations by Heis and other observers around the world continued almost annually thereafter, with maximum rates typically falling between 37 and 88 per hour through 1858. Interestingly, the rates jumped to between 78 and 102 in 1861, according to estimates by four different observers, and, in 1863, three observers reported rates of 109 to 215 per hour. Although rates were still somewhat high in 1864, generally "normal" rates persisted throughout the remainder of the 19th-century. Computations of the orbit of the Perseids between 1864 and 1866 by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910) revealed a very strong resemblance to periodic comet Swift-Tuttle (1862 III). This was the first time a meteor shower had been positively identified with a comet and it seems safe to speculate that the high Perseid rates of 1861-1863 were directly due to the appearance of Swift-Tuttle, which has a period of about 120 years. Multiple returns of the comet would be responsible for the distribution of the meteors throughout the orbit, but meteors should be denser in the region closest to the comet, so that meteor activity should increase when the comet is near perihelion (as has been demonstrated by the June Boà ¶tids, Draconids and Leonids). As the 20th-century began, the maximum annual hourly rates of the Perseids