2023-08-10 08:01:00
One can only dream of a Perseid night as beautiful as this, at the former Swiss Alpine Club’s Monte Rosa Hut on the Gorner Glacier near Zermatt, photographed early in the morning of August 21, 2009.
ATS
On the night of Saturday to Sunday, August 12-13, the annual Perseid meteor shower will appear in the sky. In French-speaking Switzerland, nearly 500 cities and towns have been called upon to turn off their public lighting.
Up to 100 shooting stars may be seen per hour between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., according to Meteonews. After a record number in 2018, the meteor stream should be weaker once more this year.
The best vantage points are far from the big cities, on hills and mountains. As an anticyclone with clear skies is forecast for the weekend, shooting star visibility should be good.
The Perseids are a meteor stream that reaches its peak each August: Earth, orbiting the sun, plunges into a cloud of debris left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle as it travels through space.
Laurent’s Tears
In popular parlance, the Perseids are also called “Tears of Lawrence” because they occur around August 10, the feast day of Saint Lawrence in Rome.
Several cities in French-speaking Switzerland will turn off part of their public lighting to allow the population to better see the shooting stars. For this 5th edition, nearly 500 municipalities were invited to turn the switch: a large number of them answered the call totally or partially.
For example, municipalities participate in the operation in the four corners of the canton of Vaud. In the city of Lausanne, Ouchy and Sauvabelin, two areas without car traffic will be plunged into darkness.
On the project-perseides.org site, an interactive map allows everyone to find out if their municipality is offering a particular action for this special night.
Founded in Orbe (VD) in 2019, the Perseides Project is a non-profit association whose goal is to turn off, every year, throughout Europe, artificial lighting on the night of August 12 to 13. In German-speaking Switzerland, the organization Dark-Sky, of American origin, has created an antenna: it deals with the problem of light pollution in Switzerland.
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