It’s showtime for star-struck meteor fans

East Valley stargazers will gather tonight for a special sight: The dusty trails of a comet burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Astronomers say the annual Perseid meteor shower is at its best this year, revealing as many as two meteors per minute during peak hours tonight and Monday morning. The lack of light from the new moon will provide an especially dark backdrop for the show.

Frank Pino, a member of the East Valley Astronomy Club, said the Perseids start at the end of July and last until Aug. 18 every year.

“We go through a dust cloud this time every year,” Pino said.

Debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet ranges in size from a grain of sand to that of a marble, but the speed at which the debris enters Earth’s atmosphere — an estimated 32,000 mph — makes each piece produce a great deal of light.

“They’re just grains of sand streaking across the sky,” Pino explained. “As we pass through the debris field, debris comes burning up through the atmosphere.”

And it’s all visible with the naked eye. “Telescopes don’t help at all,” Pino said.

He’s hosting a viewing party at his home in Queen Creek for the East Valley Astronomy Club. From 11 p.m. today until daylight Monday, the group will sit back, relax and fix their eyes northeastward. They believe they’ll see about 60 meteors per hour.

Pino said Queen Creek is still a good area for stargazing despite the town’s rapid growth, but he’s not sure how long it will last.

“We’re getting overwhelmed by lights,” he said.

The buzz about the meteor shower is out.

Martin Thompson, manager of the observatory at the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch in Gilbert, said astronomy fans were out en masse Friday night. He said about 180 showed up to stargaze in the Valley’s only domed observatory.

People learned about Neptune, the asteroid Vesta and globular clusters, described as “concentrated collections of stars in one little area” by Randy Peterson, an East Valley Astronomy Club member from Scottsdale.

Peterson said the best time to view Perseids is from midnight until 4:30 a.m. Monday.

At midnight, we’re facing away from the sun, Peterson said, but we’re perpendicular to the direction the Earth is traveling. Between midnight and dawn, we get closer and closer to facing forward.

Even though we’re not facing perfectly into the Earth’s line of travel until 6 a.m., “astronomical twilight” ends stargazing about 4:30 a.m.

Facing the direction the Earth is traveling is like looking through the front windshield as Earth drives into meteors’ trails of dust.

For good viewing points in the East Valley, Peterson suggests driving out to the lakes among the Superstition Mountains, heading toward the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior or driving south past Queen Creek, taking care to avoid private property.

Anyone interested in Pino’s Queen Creek viewing party can e-mail events@eastvalleyastronomy.org.

Comet and meteor facts

• Meteoroids become meteors when they enter Earth’s atmosphere.

• Meteors rarely hit the ground. But if they do, they’re called meteorites.

• The comet Swift-Tuttle, whose debris forms the Perseids, is the largest object astronomers know to repeatedly pass near our planet. Its center is about six miles wide.

• One astronomer has calculated that the comet might miss Earth by only a million miles in 3044.

• Swift-Tuttle takes 130 years to orbit the sun.

• Swift-Tuttle itself was last seen in 1992, and first documented in 1862 by astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle.

• Swift-Tuttle is due back in 2126.

Sources: www.space.com; International Meteor Organization