APOD: 2026 August 12 – Perseids over a Little Planet

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APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Explanation: It looks like a view from the Little Prince ‘s planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower , surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland . Visible in the sky is the arch of the Milky Way , along with several nebulas in red and over a hundred meteors pointing to the radiant . The Perseids are easily visible and quite popular in the Northern Hemisphere summer. (Watching meteor showers in the winter is less convenient for a good reason ). This year they are expected to offer an even more dazzling spectacle than usual, because the peak coincides with a new moon . The 2026 Perseid meteor shower will peak tonight with as many as 50-100 meteors per hour , when the Earth’s path crosses through debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle . Typically, the best times for seeing the meteors are between midnight and pre-dawn. You won’t need binoculars to see the meteors , but a lawn chair and a dark sky location help.

NASA Stream: August 12 Total Solar Eclipse . Tomorrow’s picture: pixels in space