This week, Earth is entering a stream of dusty debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, the parent of the annual Perseid meteor shower. We're only in the outskirts of the stream now. The shower won't peak until August 12th and 13th when we're much deeper inside. Nevertheless, sky watchers are already seeing some early Perseids. This one, recorded by a NASA meteor camera in Alabama on August 3rd, was a doozy:
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Western Ontario

View movie HERE.

"On Monday night, a Perseid meteoroid, about 1 inch in diameter and traveling at 134,000 mph, entered the atmosphere 70 miles above Paint Rock, Alabama," reports Bill Cooke of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Moving at such a tremendous speed, the meteor cut a path some 65 miles long above that state, finally burning up 56 miles above Macay Lake. It was 6 times brighter than the planet Venus--a good start to the Perseid meteor shower!"

Stay tuned for more Perseids as Earth moves deeper into the debris stream.