Wildfire smoke may make Perseid meteor show invisible this year

‘It’s been horrible. I’ve never seen it so smoky as this year,’ says astronomy ranger Bob Bohley

Smoke from this year’s relentless wildfires has ruined the view of what’s normally a magnificent meteor shower, experts say.

The Perseid meteor shower, which reaches its apex this week, is normally visible from Colorado’s Rocky Mountains at this time of year. This summer, however, even normal stars are hard to see through the haze.

“It’s been horrible,” Bob Bohley, an astronomy ranger at Great Sand Dunes National Park, told The New York Times. “I’ve never seen it so smoky as this year.”

Wildfires have torn through the western United States for the past several summers. This year, more than 105 fires have been burning across the West. The Dixie Fire, which began in California last month, has already destroyed 550 homes and is still not contained.

One result of all that fire is smoke – millions of tons of it, clogging the sky for months. That smoke is bad news for stargazers.

“Some nights it’s been so thick that even the brightest stars were hard to make out,” Mr Bohley said. “I would just point in the direction of a constellation and hope folks would see something.”

The Perseids are pieces of Comet Swift-Tuttle, or Comet 109P, a 16-mile-wide object that takes 133 years to orbit the Sun, according to NASA. Normally, viewers with a good perch in the Rockies should be able to see up to 40 meteors per hour.

But this year, like many recent years, has not been normal. Due to the climate crisis, extreme weather events like droughts, heat waves, and wildfires have become more common and more intense.

“It’s all connected,” Bettymaya Foott, a photographer at the International Dark-Sky Association, told the Times. “Just as light pollution and smoke don’t respect boundaries, the consequences of how we handle climate change travel far.”