blog.gov.jeWith mostly clear skies expected for at least a week, the Perseid Meteor shower (which started on Friday 17th of July) will provide a great many opportunities for those who wish to wish upon a star. However, as the intensity of this 38 day meteor shower begins to increase, there is initially quite a bit of moonlight to contend with, as the Buck moon waxes into, and then wanes away from, its fullness (the precise day being Wednesday 29th of July). That said, this particular lunar cycle has an interesting quirk that makes the moon appear large and orange, but does not allow its light to dominate the sky to the usual extent.
The quirk that I speak of is that the July moon stays very low to the horizon, and this is because as it travels westwards across our night skies, it actually follows the same path that the January sun follows across our daytime skies. Therefore, through the rest of July, plenty of Perseid dust particles will ignite on the edge of our atmosphere, but perhaps the soft amber glow of the Buck moon will simply be more interesting to look at… making it more of a distraction than an obscurant.
No worries there though, truly dedicated shooting star hunters can simply remove the distraction by throwing down a comfy blanket, lying flat on their backs and stretching their gaze over the remaining vastness of the sky dome. Furthermore, if your wishes can wait that long, then the real peak of the meteor shower will come a couple of weeks later (12th and 13th of August), when the Buck moon will have completely waned away, in readiness for its reincarnation as the sturgeon moon of August. So with the new moon’s birth coinciding with the Perseid peak (more than two visible shooters per minute), the silver streaks will be blessed with the blackest of canvases to blaze upon (weather permitting).
Whilst we are on the subject of the new moon, let’s just remind ourselves of a lunar basic that is often forgotten in the lifelessness of our modern pseudo-celestiality (aka streetlamps, car-lights, aeroplanes and satellites etc)… the more slender the crescent, the less time it spends in our night skies and the more likely we are to see it by day. This is because, the sun is lighting up the far side of the moon, the side that we cannot see. In other words, whenever the moon is new (or close to new) then its position is somewhere in between the earth and the sun. Emphasis on the word ‘somewhere’, because this doesn’t mean we get monthly solar eclipses. Indeed no, the vastness of space and the miniscularity of the moon, relative to the enormous but very distant sun, means that the moon can occupy a great many such positions without obscuring the sun completely. However, every now and then, these three great orbs do line up in such a way, perhaps only a couple of times in an average human lifetime, that we get to witness a complete inverse of the norm… a moment of visual quietness, when we might just hear our beautiful moon speaking in her own voice, rather than the echoing that of the sun.
On this occasion (August 12th 2026) then if you happen to have booked a holiday to Reykjavik, to almost anywhere in Northern Spain, or to any of the Balearic Islands, then you (and thousands of ecstatic others) will witness the totality of the eclipse. If you are here in the Channel Islands, the eclipse will only be partial, but that partiality will be impressively large, with 94% coverage at 7:17pm. Especially impressive because with the sun so low in our western sky at that late hour (only 73 minutes before sunset), the colourfully mood-lit remainder of the sky will only serve to enhance the darkness further.
So whether it be the evening of the almost total eclipse, or the full nights of the low-swinging Buck moon, or the intensification of the Perseid meteor shower, or perhaps even the pre-dawn likelihood of neon-blue noctilucent clouds in our Northern skies (I’ll let you digress at your own discretion with that one), the one feature that all these spectacles depend upon is the absence of that old familiar blanket of cloud. You know… the thick grey one that the Atlantic wind so frequently pulls across our skies. Whilst our thirsty Islands certainly need more in the way of rain right now (I’m not negating this in the slightest ), it sure would be fantastic if it could fall in the more opportune moments, and allow the billowing blanket to be banished when these spectacles are here to behold.
So yes dear sky, just as we ourselves have flung our duvets into the corner so many times this summer, could we ask that you please do likewise, and let us gaze upon your next few weeks of wonders?
Yours with gratitude and awe galore,
Robert Plummer
Jersey Met meteorologist