2004 Perseids are coming The annual Perseid meteor shower is
coming, and astronomers say it could be unusually good this
year. The shower begins gently in mid-July when Earth enters the
edge of a cloud of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Dust-sized
particles will hit our atmosphere and appear to streak across
the night sky. At first there will be just a few meteors each
night, but then the rate will build. The Perseids are visible
between 23 July and 22 August but, by 12 August, at the peak of
the shower, skywatchers can expect to see possibly 80-100
meteors per hour if skies are clear. This is a good year for
Perseids for two reasons. First, the Moon is new in mid-August,
so moonlight will not spoil the show as much as it would have
done last year, had the sky been clear! Second, in addition to
the usual shower on 12 August, there might be an extra show of
meteors late in the evening of 11 August caused by a ‘filament’
of dust drifting across Earth's orbit for the first time. This
filament, like all the dust