Thoughts On The Perseids

Long before tele­scopes and rock­ets, before maps of plan­ets and moons, humans looked up at the night sky and saw sto­ries. Not just shin­ing dots in the sky, but heroes, mon­sters, and gods. Among them is Perseus, whose sto­ry begins with a prophe­cy. His grand­fa­ther, King Acrisius of Argos, was warned that his daugh­ter Danaë’s son would one day kill him. In a des­per­ate attempt to out­run fate, Acrisius chained Danaë in a cham­ber deep underground. 

But high above, reign­ing over Olympus, Zeus watched. Moved by her beau­ty and soli­tude, he came to her in the form of gold­en light. From that mys­te­ri­ous union, Perseus was born.

Terrified, Acrisius locked Danaë and the infant Perseus in a wood­en cof­fin, which he cast into the sea. The sea-wor­thy cof­fin drift­ed all the way to the island of Seriphos, where a kind fish­er­man took them in. Perseus grew up strong, hon­est, and brave, but dan­ger found him again. The king Polydectes want­ed Danaë for him­self. To get rid of her son, he chal­lenged Perseus to slay the Gorgon Medusa, a mon­ster with snakes for hair whose gaze could turn any man to stone. Perseus accepted. 

The gods saw his lov­ing heart and sent divine aid. Athena gave him a pol­ished shield, Hermes a winged hel­met and san­dals. From nymphs, he received a mag­ic sword and a pouch to car­ry Medusa’s head. Perseus flew to the edge of the world, where Medusa slept. Using the shield as a mir­ror so he would not meet her eyes, Perseus crept close and, with one swift blow, cut off her head. From her bloody neck sprang Pegasus, the winged horse, a reminder that even mon­sters may give birth to beauty.

He returned with Medusa’s head and used it to defeat Polydectes. Upon his death, the gods placed Perseus among the stars, hon­or­ing his sto­ry in the night sky. There he remains, a light that oth­ers can follow.

Every August, those same gods offer me a birth­day gift. You see, I was born on August 10, just before the Perseid mete­or show­ers peak each year, clear­ly as a cel­e­bra­tion of my birth. Some years, I’ve enjoyed more than a hun­dred shoot­ing stars per hour.

Every year at this time, our plan­et bar­rels through a trail of debris shed by an ancient comet. These tiny pieces of comet frag­ments, many no larg­er than a grain of sand, col­lide with the Earth’s atmos­phere at incred­i­ble speeds. The result­ing fric­tion swift­ly vapor­izes the debris, cre­at­ing those bright, fiery flash­es we call shoot­ing stars.

When we observe a mete­or show­er from Earth, the streaks of light appear to radi­ate from a sin­gle point in the sky, like spokes from a wheel. Astronomers call this point the radi­ant. For the Perseids, the radi­ant lies in the direc­tion of the con­stel­la­tion Perseus. So, even though the mete­ors are actu­al­ly burn­ing up high in our atmos­phere after enter­ing from space, they seem to emerge from Perseus’s cor­ner of the sky. So, we call them the Perseid mete­ors. Literally, of Perseus.

It’s almost too poet­ic to believe. Flecks of cos­mic dust, cen­turies old, ignit­ing in the atmos­phere to inspire awe in a mid­dle-aged woman with her head turned heav­en­ward. So much of my life is scrolling, wor­ry­ing, plan­ning, doubt­ing. And then a flash cross­es the sky, and I remem­ber that we once looked to the stars to under­stand. We might chart the cos­mos with cal­cu­la­tions, but we name it with wonder.

Like an old friend mak­ing a long-await­ed return, I eager­ly antic­i­pate the Perseids. But this year I might be thwart­ed by anoth­er old friend: the moon. The full Sturgeon moon hits on August 9. That much light might make it hard to see the shoot­ing stars. Hopefully, the moon will have waned enough to still catch the show, when it peaks in the ear­ly morn­ing of August 13.

We have always looked up to dream. The Perseids are one of the last remain­ing com­mu­nal mir­a­cles that cost noth­ing and demand only our atten­tion. So this week, step out­side. Find a place away from the noise. Let your eyes—and heart—adjust.

And when the sky begins to fall, let it lift you instead.