Ask A Scientist© Astronomy Archive

Author:      acespades
Text:        When will there be another meteor shower as great  as this summer 
of 1993?

Response #:  1 of 1
Author:      Ronald Winther
Text:        I hope that those people who did see the Perseids this past 
summer were not disappointed; I felt that the press had over hyped this event.  
Here in Iowa we had cloudy skies so I did not 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 enhanced 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 be particularly noteworthy:  
the Orionid (peaks around Oct. 23) and the 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 recharged the meteoric material was in 1965; the next 
year, observers onthe West coast witnessed a true meteor storm, with over 100 
meteors per *second* in some cases!