About the Perseid Meteor Shower

About the Perseid Meteor Shower The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best-known showers in the year. Its one of the great astronomy events of Northern Hemisphere summer and Southern Hemisphere winter. It begins in late July and extends halfway through August, peaking around August 11 or 12th. When conditions are good, you might be able to see dozens of meteors per hour. It all really depends on the weather and what part of the meteor stream Earth moves through each year. Also, the viewing is best when theres no interference from the Moon, although you can still see the brighter meteors as they flash through the sky.   This year (2017) the peak of the shower occurs not long after full moon, so its light will wash out the view of the dimmer meteors. You will likely see a few bright meteors during this time, but dont buy into the hype about the best, the brightest shower.   Its hype and probably clickbait. Do your viewing armed with reasonable expectations and you will be rewarded (unless its cloudy).   What Causes the Perseids? The Perseid meteor shower is really material left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. It passes through our part of the solar system every 133 years. As it travels, this icy dirtball leaves behind tiny grains of ice, dust, rock, and other debris, similar to a messy tourist scattering debris from an automobile. As Earth makes its trip around the Sun, it passes through this debris field with some spectacular results, which we know as the Perseids. As Earth moves through the stream - which can stretch across 14 million to 120 million kilometers of interplanetary space -   its gravity interacts with the particles and spreads the stream out. As the comet passes by, it releases new bursts of particles, constantly refreshing the supply of material that will eventually collide with Earths atmosphere. The stream changes constantly, and this affects future Perseid meteor shower events. Sometimes Earth passes through rather thick areas of the stream, and that results in a heavy meteor shower. Other times, it traverses a thin part of the stream, and we dont see quite so many meteors.   Although there are many meteor showers annually, such as the Leonids, Lyrids, and Geminids, to name a few, the Perseid shower is the most reliable, and can be very spectacular if conditions are right. How it looks depends on several factors - ranging from whether the Moon is nearby (and bright enough to wash out the view) - to what part of the stream Earth encounters. The stream is not uniformly thick with particles, so some years the supply of materials might be less than others. In any given year, observers see anywhere from 50 to 150 meteors an hour on average, increasing at times to around 400 to 1,000 per hour.   The Perseid meteor shower, like other meteor showers, is named after the constellation from which it appears to radiate:  Perseus  (named after a Greek mythological hero)  which is located near Cassiopeia, the Queen. This is also called the radiant, since that is the direction the meteors seem to travel from as they streak across the sky. How Do I View the Perseid Meteor Shower? Meteor showers are easier to view than many other astronomical objects or events. All you need is a fairly dark location and a blanket or lawn chair. Always make sure you have a jacket handy, even if you live in a warm weather climate. Viewing late at night and early in the morning can expose you to some chilly temperatures. It may be useful to have a star chart  to help you locate Perseus, and other constellations while you’re watching, but it’s not a necessity. The shower is active from mid-July each year  when Earth enters the outer edges of the Swift-Tuttle stream.  The best viewing time varies but is often between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. around the 12th of August. The actual peak time ranges from the 9th to the 14th and then tapers off after that. For August 2017, the best viewing time is after midnight early in the morning of August 12th. There will be some interference from the Moon, which will be just past full. But, you should still be able to see the brightest ones. Also, start watching a few nights before and continue a few nights after; Perseids happen for nearly three weeks. Find a good, safe viewing area where you can get a clear view of the sky. Arrive early to set up, and  give yourself time to adjust your eyes to the darkness. Then, just sit (or lie) back, relax, and enjoy the show. Most of the meteors will appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, and streak across the sky. As you gaze, make note of the colors of the meteors as they streak through the sky. If you see bolides (larger streaks), note how long they take to traverse the sky  and notice their colors, too. The Perseids can be a very rewarding observing experience for anybody - from younger children to experienced stargazers.   Edited and expanded by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Definition and Examples of Irregular Verbs

Definition and Examples of Irregular Verbs In English grammar, an irregular verb is a  verb that does not follow the usual rules for verb forms. Also known as a strong verb. Verbs in English are irregular if they dont have the  conventional -ed ending (such as asked or ended) in the past tense and/or past participle forms. Contrast with Regular Verb. According to the  Longman Student Grammar (2002), the nine most common  lexical verbs  in English are all irregular:  say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, and  take. Pronunciation i-REG-u-lur verb Exercises Exercise in Using the Correct Forms of Irregular VerbsPractice in Using the Past Forms of Regular and Irregular VerbsProofreading for Tense Errors Examples and Observations The bridge they built brought traffic in both directions.Water slopping from the buckets froze on the feet as it fell.(Sheila Watson, Deep Hollow Creek. McClelland Stewart, 1992)The shoes the slaves bought generally cost between $1.50 and $2.00.(Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi. University of North Carolina Press, 1999)He said Roadmap Jenkins got the good loops because he knew the yardage and read the break better than anyone else.(Bo Links, Riverbank Tweed and Roadmap Jenkins. Simon Schuster, 2001)Hearts were trumps. I stood, and made three to his nothing. I dealt; he begged; I gave him one, and made three more.(George H. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, 1887)It was true, thought Miss Taylor, that the young nurses were less jolly since Sister Burstead had taken over the ward.(Muriel Spark, Memento Mori, 1959) 180 Cussed Exceptions At first glance irregular verbs would seem to have no reason to live. Why should language have forms that are just cussed exceptions to a rule?..Irregular forms are just words. If our language faculty has a knack for memorizing words, it should have no inhibitions about memorizing past-tense forms at the same time. These are the verbs we call irregular, and they are a mere 180 additions to a mental lexicon that already numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands. (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Basic, 1999) The Origin of Irregular Verbs [I]rregular verbs . . . derive from the Old English period. At that time they were called strong and weak verbs respectively. Strong verbs formed their past tense and past participle with an ablaut or vowel gradation (a means of marking different functions of a word by varying the vowel sound in its base). Weak verbs formed their past tense and past participle with an inflectional suffix, that is, a {-d} or {-t} suffix. With the loss of inflections during the Middle English period, all new verbs took on the weak verb formation with an {-ed} or {-t} in past forms. This weak formation soon became the norm for what we now refer to as English regular verbs; strong verbs became irregular verbs(Bernard ODwyer, Modern English Structures, 2nd ed. Broadview Press, 2006)modern English there are roughly half that number, in classes which overlap and have deviant internal groups, and in addition, a number of weak verbs have joined the class of irregular verbs. The Comprehensive Grammar of Englis h (1985) presents seven classes of irregular verbs, five of them with subgroups. The total membership of the modern irregular verb system is a question of criteria, depending on whether you include i) verbs which are conjugated both regularly and irregularly ii) verbs which are prefixed or compounded forms of monomorphemic irregular verbs iii) verbs which fall into the category of old-fashioned or archaic English To provide maximum help- and to avoid prejudging such issues- the Comprehensive Grammar (QGLS) presents a list of 267 irregular verbs, but it shrinks to about 150 if you apply all three criteria just mentioned. (Pam Peters, American and British Influence in Australian Verb Morphology. Creating and Using English Language Corpora, ed. by Udo Fries et al. Rodopi, 1994) The Future of Irregular Verbs Do irregular verbs have a future? At first glance, the prospects do not seem good. Old English had more than twice as many irregular verbs as we do today. As some of the verbs became less common, like cleave-clove, abide-abode, and geld-gelt, children failed to memorize their irregular forms and applied the -ed rule instead (just as today children are apt to say winded and speaked). The irregular forms were doomed for these childrens children and for all subsequent generations (though some of the dead irregulars have left souvenirs among the English adjectives, like cloven, cleft, shod, gilt, and pent).Not only is the irregular class losing members by emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new verbs enter English via onomatopoeia (to ding, to ping), borrowings from other languages (deride and succumb from Latin), and conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has first dibs on them. The language ends up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed, and flied o ut, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out. But many of the irregulars can sleep securely, for they have two things on their side. One is their sheer frequency in the language. The ten commonest verbs in English (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get) are all irregular, and about 70% of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb. And children have a wondrous capacity for memorizing words; they pick up a new one every two hours, accumulating 60,000 by high school. Eighty irregulars are common enough that children use them before they learn to read, and I predict they will stay in the language indefinitely. (Steven Pinker, quoted by Lewis Burke Frumkes in Favorite Words of Famous People. Marion Street Press, 2011) A New Strong Verb in English The magazine Ozwords published by the Australian National Dictionary Centre has confirmed something that Ive suspected for some time- snuck as the past tense of sneak is now more usual than sneaked. . . . It is always good news to hear of a successful new strong verb in English!..Fewer than 60 of the original 350 strong verbs remain- and even this very small number includes many rather dodgy ones like glide/glode, beseech/besaught, cleave/cleft/cloven, beget/begat/begotten, chide/chid/chidden, slay/slew/slain and smite/smote/smitten. Hardly part of a Modern English speakers active vocabulary! So you can see that a new strong verb like sneak/snuck is a cause for celebration- that is, if you are worried about the extinction of forms like glide/glode. (Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011) The Lighter Side of Irregular Verbs A boy who swims may say he swum, But milk is skimmed and seldom skum, And nails you trim; they are not trum.   When words you speak, these words are spoken, But a nose is tweaked and cant be twoken. And what you seek is seldom soken. If we forget, then weve forgotten, But things we wet are never wotten, And houses let cannot be lotten. The things one sells are always sold, But fog dispelled are not dispold, And what you smell is never smold. When young, a top you oft saw spun, But did you see a grin ever grun, Or a potato neatly skun? (anonymous, Variable Verbs or Verbs Is Funny) Also See Introduction to Irregular VerbsPrincipal Parts of Irregular VerbsWhats the Difference Between a Weak Verb and a Strong Verb?