Dr. Rishi Shah 

As it darkens, the night skies of this month offer the magnificent marvels of planets, stars and constellations that are embellishing the heavens. Planets Mercury and Mars would be lost in solar glare, due to their proximity to the Sun. They would be moving across the compelling constellation Leo (lion) during the daytime. Planet Venus could be visualised in the western sky after sundown as dusk would fade to darkness. They would be venturing out through the starry fields sprawling across constellations Leo and Virgo (maiden).

Scintillating stars Regulus (Rohini) and Spica (Chitra) could be appraised above Venus. Regulus and Spica are two baffling binary stars that are approximately 79 and 250 light-years away. The elongated constellation Hydra (sea serpent) would be slinking serenely below Venus. Compact constellations Corvus (raven), Crater (cup) and Sextans (instrument) are straddled snugly on Hydra’s back.
Planets Jupiter and Saturn will be entering elegantly south-eastern skies after nightfall. They would appear at the highest positions in the southern sky at around midnight and be hovering over the southwestern horizon till they would be evanescent in the morning twilight.

Graceful Jupiter
Jupiter will be gliding gracefully from the western area of constellation Aquarius (water bearer) towards the northeastern stretch of comely constellation Capricornus (sea goat). Saturn will sail in the northern domain of Capricornus. On August 02 and 19, Saturn and Jupiter would be in opposition to the Sun and make their closest approaches to earth at 1.34 and 0.6 billion kilometres.
They would be fully illuminated by solar irradiance and be more luminous than any other time of the year. They would be visible throughout the night and provide planet-enthusiasts the best time to view and photograph them with their mesmerising moons. Through telescopes, Saturn's rings and a few mysterious moons along with Jupiter's cloud bands could be applauded. Mighty Jupiter's four largest Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) could be admired amazingly as they would be depicted as dramatically resplendent dancing dots on either side of the planet.

The far-away greenish planet Uranus could be perceived as very late at night in the eastern sky until dawn before daybreak in the southern sky. It would be gleaming as a point of light in a relatively barren expanse located midway between the southern segment of constellation Aries (ram) and hexagon-like asterism describing the top north section of the commanding constellation Cetus (sea monster). Another distant bluish planet, Neptune, could be glimpsed late at night in the south-eastern sky until sunup in the south-western sky.

It will be mingling with shimmering stars dwelling in the north-eastern realm of constellation Aquarius. The famed circle of asterism belonging to the constellation Pisces (fishes) could be seen above Neptune. The new moon will fall on 08 August, while the full moon (Janai Purnima) will mystify moon-lovers on 22 August. The popular moniker of this full moon would be aptly sturgeon full moon because sturgeon fishes of major lakes could be easily caught during this time of the year. Naag Panchami, Gai Jatra and Krishna Asthami will be celebrated cheerfully on 13, 23 and 30 August respectively.
The Perseid meteor shower could be exhibiting up to sixty meteors per hour at its peak this year on the night of 12 August until sunrise on 13 August 2021. The shower would run annually from 17 July to 24 August. The waxing crescent moon would set early and thus the tenebrous moonless skies would be left behind for savouring splendid meteor shower show.

Double Cluster
Perseids would seemingly emanate from the radiant nestled in the constellation Perseus (legendary hero) near its famous Double Star Cluster. The W-shaped circumpolar constellation Cassiopeia (chained princess) would directly define the details of the Double Cluster that would exist as two open star clusters circa seven and half thousand light-years away.
They would vividly mark the northern tip of the constellation Perseus. When earth would cross the trajectory of Comet109P/Swift-Tuttle, the parent comet of the Perseids, the petit particles from this comet that litter the comet’s course would slam into the earth’s upper atmosphere at some 53.33 kilometres per second. They would disintegrate and burn up as meteors in the earth's atmosphere fairly one hundred kilometres above the earth's surface and thus light up the sky in wee hours after midnight with fast-fleeting flares of Perseids.

If the earth would rush through the unusually dense clump of meteoroids or comet rubble an elevated number of shooting stars could further be witnessed. Fireballs could persist longer than an average meteor streak. If any meteor would survive its fiery plunge to hit the ground intact, the left-over portion would be called a meteorite. Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle would express a very eccentric oblong orbit that would carry this comet outside the path of the dwarf planet Pluto when farthest from Sun, and inside the track of earth when in the vicinity to the Sun. It would revolve around Sun in a period of sheer 133 years.
Every time this comet would hurtle through the inner Solar System, the Sun would warm and soften up the ices in the comet, causing it to release fresh cometary debris into its orbital stream. Comet Swift-Tuttle was ascertained in 1862 by American astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle. It is a large comet with its nucleus twenty-six kilometres across.
It was Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who had realized in 1865 that this comet was the source of the Perseids. Its dimension could comparatively be almost twice the size of the iconic Chicxulub impactor that could have triggered the devastating demise of the dinosaurs arguably sixty-six million years ago. Comet Swift-Tuttle had last reached Perihelion (comfortably the closest spot to the Sun) in December 1992 and would do so next in July 2126.

Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) had been identified in December 2019. Before it could arrive at its perihelion, its solid nucleus broke apart into pieces and the comet sadly shattered. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope verified the fragments of the crumbled comet as its ice sublimated in increasing warmth when it was drawing nearer to the Sun. Coincidently Solar Orbiter an international cooperative mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA was launched in February 2020.

Solar Orbiter
Its team had noticed that its trail would pass through ATLAS' tail. Solar Orbiters rendezvoused with the comet and detected unprecedented magnetic field structure. The results disclosed that the magnetic field of the ion tail would remain for some time after the comet’s collapse. Additionally, the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind would bend and drape around the freakish magnetic field of the ion tail. Comets have two tails. The dust tail would be concocted from dregs ejected by the comet as icy material would sublimate and generate a dusty atmosphere known as a coma around the nucleus. Radiation pressure from the Sun and the solar wind would push dust away forming a tail.

The ion tail would stem when solar ultraviolet light would ionise molecules in the coma that would be blown away by the solar wind as ion tail. Oort Cloud has been postulated as a spherical region of space, surrounding the Sun at vast distances ranging from 0.03 to 1.6 light-years. It has been deemed a home for the remnants of the very first days of our Solar system and is composed of countless icy objects even like short and long-period comets. A massive meteor had briefly brightened southern Norway as it had rumbled recently across the sky. It could have whacked the wooded sector of Finnemarka sixty kilometres west of Oslo, as it fell and erupted into fulgent flash with scary sound. No meteorites had been found at the presumed location of the spooky crash.
No injuries to people or damage to property have been reported. The meteor was probably whizzing at a whopping 15-20 kilometres per second and had scintillated the summer night sky for sparsely five to six seconds. It could have weighed ten kilogrammes and been tumbling from the asteroid belt rolling between Mars and Jupiter. A meteor had exploded eerily over central Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. Its shock wave had smashed windows, destroyed buildings and hurt many people.

(Dr. Shah is an academician at NAST and a patron at Nepal Astronomical Society, NASO).