A Perseid seen in August 2010 above the four enclosures of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile. S. Guisard/ESO
A Space-Station View of 2016's Perseid Meteor Shower
Not many people get to watch shooting stars from above.
Consider yourself lucky if you looked up to catch this year’s extremely active Persied meteors —or luckier still, if you looked down to see them tracing fiery streaks over a darkened planet.
Crew on the International Space Station could do just that last week when the shower hit its peak. This August 10 video from NASA and Japan’s Planetary Exploration Research Center shows, at 0:06 and 0:16, two Perseids burning up above Pakistan. (No astronauts were ventilated by space pebbles during the recording of this footage.)
Impressive views, as well as not having a sore neck the day after observing a shower, is one of the benefits of working aboard the station. Here are two other meteors spied from the ISS, the first from July 30 and the second from August 2011:
