This year’s Perseids were surprisingly underreported by the public. Mary and I spotted around 50 Perseids over a 4-hour period on the night of the 12th. This is far below the expected rate of 60 per hour, but reflects the fact that humans can only observe about a third of the sky, and often miss faint meteors.
Perhaps because of the weather, and perhaps because it was a Monday night – and perhaps because there was an auroral display on the 13th which probably washed out fainter meteors – there were only a few reports from members this year. Karen Martin spotted ten Perseids during a 100-minute period on the night of the 11th. Robin Scagell was out with his camera and mark-1 eyeballs, and on the early morning of the 11th he saw three Perseids and two sporadics before cloud intervened, while he saw 24 Perseids and four sporadics in a three-hour period on the night of the 11th/12th. All the reported events were pretty faint, probably magnitude zero or less.
Our meteor cameras picked up 1300 meteors on the same night, but then they can see two magnitudes fainter or six times dimmer than humans. In fact, there were so many Perseids detected by the Global Meteor Network that the data processing only caught up by early October!
Hourly detections of Perseids. Data from the UK Meteor Network with permission
The IMO did receive reports of around half a dozen Perseid fireballs, some of which can be tied in with video network reports from the UK Meteor Network, but there were no meteorite dropping events. The best of the fireballs was over the sea between England and Belgium, and reached magnitude -7.3
A Perseid fireball from 2024-08-14 at 00:03. Image from the UK Meteor Network, with permission.
Members Photos
Robin Scagell was out on the evenings of 12th and 13th and sent in several photos. In several photos ou can see some red aurora behind the meteor! Mary McIntyre also captured auroral activity with a meteor, as well as colour in the meteor’s tail. Another picture from Robin shows a bright sporadic at the left with a fainter Perseid on the right. The brightly lit cirrus cloud you can see in this picture probably hit many fainter meteors. The bright sporadic left a train behind which can be seen in a second picture. Other photos are from myself.
Click on an image to see a bigger version.
Other Showers
There are a great many other minor showers during this period – the International Meteor Organization lists around 70 – however none of them get above a rate of two to three per hour and even the video networks didn’t report more than a handful.
The table below shows the relative abundance of confirmed meteors for the top five minor showers, compared to the Perseids. As you can see, the Perseids are at least thirty-five times more abundant!
However, don’t be discouraged: with so many showers in progress at once, you are likely to see meteors pretty much all night from one shower or another. Our cameras typically pick up 80-100 meteors every clear night in August and September even though the nights are short.
| Code | Name | Peak Date | Matches |
| PER | Perseids | 12-Aug | 8262 |
| KAP | kappa Perseids | 10-Aug | 231 |
| AUD | August Draconids | 01-Aug | 226 |
| NUE | nu Eridanids | 05-Sep | 220 |
| NDA | Northern delta Aquariids | 01-Aug | 213 |
| SPE | September epsilon Perseids | 10-Sep | 157 |