Ask A Scientist© Astronomy Archive

Question:  WHEN WILL THERE BE ANOTHER METEOR SHOWER AS GREAT AS THIS SUMMER
1993?
acespades

Answer:  I hope that those people who did see the Perseids this past summer were 
not disappointed; I felt that the press had overhyped this event. Here in Iowa
we had cloudy skies so I didn't get to see just how good this meteor shower was. 
The Perseid shower is usually one of the best of any given year; this one was en hanced by the
passage of its parent comet, Swift-Tuttle, which supplied new material in 1992.
There are two more meteor showers that I know of this year, neither of them
expected to beparticluarly noteworthy: the Orionid (peaks around Oct. 23) and th e Leonid (peaks
around Nov. 17). The Orionid is due to debris left by comet Halley.
 But better things are possibly in store:  the October issue of Sky and
Telescope says that next year's Perseids could be at least as good as
those of this past August, and if you want to look way ahead, the Leonid
shower of 1998 or 1999 may be spectacular because of the passage of its
parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle, in Feb. 1998. The last time this comet re-
charged the meteoric material was in 1965; the next year, observers on
the West coast witnessed a true meteor storm, with over 100 meteors per
*second* in some cases!