This wikipedia article on the parent body of the Perseids - Comet Swift-Tuttle - gives some interesting background that may be of use at tonight's star party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Swift-Tuttle I sat outside from 1:15am to 2:00am this morning from an urban SLC location. Relaxed in the night air and watched a one steradian region due east bewteen Per and Jupiter. For meteors saw: 1:41am One sporadic heading celestial west-to-east through Trapezium, mag 3, 8 deg smokey tail, reddish colored. 1:44am On radiant mag 2.5 from Mirfak to the Double Cluster, mag 2.5, 3 deg tail. 1:53am On radiant from Mirfak through Trapezium, mag. 3, 10 deg smokey tail. No detections on a video meteor setup with 0 mag photographic limit, south facing camera, 160 TFOV. Posted updated meteor radio reflection chart for Utah to the RMOB site: http://217.169.242.217/rmob/pages/liveradiometeorpage.php This chart is still dominated by the del Aqr shower peak at the beginning of the month. SLC meteor reflection counts from 8-7-2010 to 8-12-2010 (UT time) for 6, 7 and 8 UT (midnight, 1am, 2am MST). TimeDT 7 8 9 10 11 12 5-6UT: 74 76 103 93 85 55 6-7UT: 52 65 36 95 64 55 7-8UT: 59 92 52 82 27 88 8-9UT: 84 128 46 38 76 94 I generally use info like that shown in the table to guesstimate which hour would be the most likely to see the coming visual peak. Note the meteor radio reflections technique mostly counts meteors that have too small a mass to be observed visually. My station's meteor radio reflection spectrographs are showing many more larger, longer persisting meteor trails thant normal. The date of the peak distribution of these lighter particles is not the same as for heavier visual meteors. IMO Live visual observing count for last night is about 45 ZHR. - Clear Skies - Kurt