The 2026 Perseid Meteor shower promises to be an incredible astronomical event! For this one, we’ll leave the kayaks and paddleboards at home. August in Texas is generally unbearable for camping in arid climates, however this meteor shower makes these conditions a minor inconvenience!
My son and I did this trip back around 2016. That year the Perseids were predicted to have an “outburst” – that is more meteors than normal. The forecast was right! There were so many meteors flying across the sky that if you peeled your eyes away, you missed two or three! The 2026 event is forecast to also be an outburst. This will also be a moon-free night, so conditions will be PERFECT, as long as the weather cooperates!
Copper Breaks State Park is 200 miles west of the DFW metroplex, it has the darkest skies within that proximity of any other location (Bortle scale of 2, for reference Big Bend is a 1). We will be camping in the Big Pond Campground at the top of a hill with an unobstructed view of the sky.
The Perseids originate from comet Swift-Tuttle, which has an orbit of 133 years. It last returned in 1992, so we will never witness this shower’s source. With a predicted hourly rate of 120 meteors, we’ll have a real show on our hands. At this rate, the view is simply awe-inspiring. The great songwriter John Denver witnessed this shower, it is said to have inspired his song “Rocky Mountain High”. These meteors are caused by grit-like debris from Swift-Tuttle still orbiting the sun at the same plane as the earth’s path. These particles enter the atmosphere at an angle that causes long-lived shooting stars that many times traverse long distances across the sky before burning up at an altitude of 70 to 100 kilometers. The radiant of this shower (point in the sky from) which they appear to come from does not actually rise above the horizon until after dawn, so the best viewing comes in the pre-dawn hours. Often the trails, or trains, left by these meteors persist for several seconds before fading back into darkness.
In the past, I have driven out to the park after work, stayed awake all night watching, then drive back home to get sleep the next day. The inconvenient part of this event is that it happens on a Wednesday night / Thursday morning. If this is a repeat performance of the last outburst I witnessed, it is very much worth the sacrifice for the experience!
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