ESCANABA — A couple of nights ago, while taking a bag of trash out to the cart beside the garage, a flash of light lit up the sky to the northeast. Looking up, I saw a faint, gently glowing streak running down the sky alongside the Milky Way. I watched for several seconds as the train slowly faded away. Beginning back in mid-July, quietly and predictably, the Perseid meteor shower has been steadily building toward its peak on the night of Monday, August 12. These fast, bright meteors are caused by tiny bits of dust and small pebbles left in the wake of Comet, 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which was first seen in 1862.

The swarm of dust and debris from Swift-Tuttle fans out in a wide band that crosses Earth’s orbit so that our planet plows into the thickest part of the stream right around August 11 to 13 each year. No matter what your horoscope may say, it’s not fate or magic, it’s just celestial mechanics and the slow, steady push of the solar wind as it acts on the band of dusty debris.

Fortunately for us, meteor showers are the cheapest of dates. All you need to see them is to find a site under dark skies away from light pollution, such as the fairway of a golf course, the middle of a grassy field, or a beach near a lake with an open view to the north and east. It works best to find a wide view of the sky. Don’t look straight up toward Perseus in the northeast as the best ones spread out in all directions well down the sky. We like to set up our lounge chair or lay out on a blanket looking east along the river of the Milky Way as it flows down the sky.

We like to take a pair of modest binoculars with us for scanning the Milky Way between meteors. A good pair of wide angle sports binoculars with specifications between 7×40 to 10×50 work well. This year a 44% lit crescent Moon will set around 11 p.m. on Monday night leaving the skies dark when the shower reaches its peak in the hours after midnight. That’s when the night side of Earth is plowing head-on into the heart of the meteor stream. If you can’t stay up that late don’t worry, sporadic bright bolides will begin to fall down the sky as soon as skies darken to deep blue in the evening hours both in the days leading up to the peak and for a few nights afterward.

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Dan Young is a member of the Delta Astronomical Society.