Meteor shower, northern lights expected over B.C. skies

If your weekend plans don’t involve looking at the night sky, you might miss out.

The annual Perseid Meteor Shower will peak this weekend, and there’s a chance it could be coupled with the northern lights over parts of B.C.

Michael Unger, the programs coordinator at the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre in Vancouver, tells 1130 NewsRadio that the planet is about to move through the remnants of a comet.

“So every year, around this time, there is a big cloud of debris that the Earth moves through,” said Unger.

“And this is the weekend to see the Perseid Meteor Shower. Of course, because they are tiny particles of dust and rock, you’d really need to get to a dark sky to see them. You don’t need a telescope, you don’t need any fancy equipment, really. You just need a really dark location and, hopefully, a large sky.”

He says if you do plan to head into somewhere dark, away from urban light pollution, you should get there 30 minutes before the shower starts to let your eyes adjust.

“I don’t want people to be going out for a 5 minute walk, or 10 minute walk, expecting to see something. You’ve got to set yourself up, get a nice blanket, maybe something warm to drink and be prepared to be out there for a couple hours,” said Unger.

He says the shower will start to be visible around midnight.

At the same time, Unger says, people in the Lower Mainland might get to see the northern lights. He says thanks to recent solar flare activity, “coronal mass ejections” are making their way across space to react with Earth’s atmosphere.

“There is a a small chance in the Lower Mainland to see it [Friday night], maybe a bit better on Saturday or perhaps Sunday to see them. But again, it’s the same conditions for the meteor shower. You need to be in a really dark sky location and you also have to be patient as well. “

Unger says the confluence of the two events over the same location is extremely rare.

“I’ve been a sky watcher my whole life and I’ve never seen both of them at the same time,” he said.

He says this weekend is also an opportunity for people to pause and be “present.”

“When you’re out there looking up at the stars and looking at these incredibly vast, distant places, you get the sense that we live in such a huge, majestic universe. And by seeing meteor showers, by seeing the aurora borealis, I think we’ve become a little bit more connected. And I think we all could use a little bit of that in our lives.”

—With files from Srushti Gangdev.