The next major opportunity to “wish upon a shooting star” comes Friday and Saturday night during the Perseid meteor shower.
Mary Adams is the director of the Headlands International Dark Sky Park in Emmet County. She said the best time and place for viewing is in a wide open space preferably away from city lights between midnight and dawn.
“There’s some things circulating on the internet that says it's going to be the brightest meteor shower in history, but unfortunately that isn't true. Because the moon is just past its full phase but coming up late in the evening and staying up all night when the meteor shower usually peaks so we’ll have moonlight to contend with”.
Forecasts predict cloud cover Friday night and partly cloudy conditions Saturday night. Adams said pairing the clouds with the moonlight could interfere with how many meteors are visible to the eye.
“You know I’ve seen a couple places, reputable places reporting that there might be slight increase this year in the number that you would see per hour. Some predicting about a hundred meteors per hour. So that's more than one per minute. So that's a lot. I’ve only ever seen that once in my lifetime about five or six years ago”.
Adams said regardless of the moon and clouds some meteors should still be visible.