THE NIGHT OF SAN LORENZO
San Lorenzo is the name given to the night between August 10th and 11th, traditionally also known as the “night of shooting stars” and considered the best time to lie down and gaze at the sky in the hope of spotting some.
The night of San Lorenzo was once the best time to observe the Perseid meteor shower. However, this century has seen the best time to observe the shooting stars change slightly, now running from August 11th to 13th.
This year, the days around San Lorenzo also coincide with the days of the old Moon, as there was a full Moon on Saturday, August 9th. This means that the illuminated portion of the Moon is waning but still almost complete, and therefore there is less darkness in the sky at night: an unfavorable condition for stargazing. As the days pass, the illuminated portion will become less and less, and therefore the conditions will improve. Beyond the Moon, the ideal times to see the “shooting stars of San Lorenzo,” also known as the “Tears of San Lorenzo,” will be the night between Monday, August 11th and Tuesday, August 12th, and especially the following night, between Tuesday, August 12th and Wednesday, August 13th.
What we call shooting stars are not stars, but meteoric fragments of rock formed by the disintegration of a comet: most of these fragments are the size of grains of sand. Those visible these days belong to a particular group of debris called the Perseids, named after the constellation Perseus, which crosses Earth’s orbit between late July and the third week of August. At their peak, about one hundred light trails can be observed with the naked eye from Earth every hour.
The comet that gave rise to the so-called Perseid shower is called Swift-Tuttle and was first discovered in 1862 thanks to two separate observations by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle. The light trails we observe are created by debris released by the comet, which, hitting the atmosphere at a speed of 200,000 kilometers per hour, ignites, creating “fireballs” visible from Earth. The phenomenon has been observed for millennia: among the first notes on what happened in the sky during this period of the year are those