Saturday is the night famous for the passage of the Perseid meteor shower, which, however, will be more visible between August 11th and 13th

Once upon a time, San Lorenzo was the night when the so-called Perseid meteor shower could be best observed. In this century, however, the best time to watch the shooting stars has changed slightly between 11 and 13 August.

The night of San Lorenzo, between 10 and 11 August, is also traditionally known as the “night of shooting stars”, and there is a widespread habit, among enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike, of lying down and looking at the sky.

This year, the ideal times to see the “shooting stars of San Lorenzo,” also known as the “Tears of San Lorenzo,” will be the nights between Sunday, August 11th, and Monday, August 12th.

What we call shooting stars are not stars but rather meteoric fragments of rock that were generated by the disintegration of a comet: for the most part, these fragments are as large as grains of sand. Those that can be seen these days belong to the particular group of debris called Perseids, named after the constellation of Perseus, which crosses the Earth’s orbit between the end of July and the third week of August. At the moment of most significant activity, observing about one hundred light trails every hour from Earth with the naked eye is possible.

The comet that gave rise to the so-called Perseid shower is called Swift-Tuttle and was discovered for the first time in 1862, thanks to two separate observations made by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle. The light trails we observe are created by debris released by the comet, which ignites upon encountering the atmosphere at a speed of 200,000 kilometres per hour, creating “fireballs” visible from Earth. The phenomenon has been observed for millennia: among the first notations on what happened in the sky at this time of year were those of Chinese astronomers, dating back to 36 AD.