The Daily: 11 August 2026

The Perseids meteor shower begins its peak tonight. This floating pile of space gunk is left over from Comet Swift-Tuttle and is quite thick still, making for hundreds of collisions with our atmosphere as Earth’s orbit passes through the debris between July 17th and August 24th. From the 11th through the 13th, you can expect fifty or so meteor sightings an hour, about one a minute. The best time to watch is in the early morning, but you can see them all night, especially on the 12th as the Dark Moon means no moonlight to wash out the meteor fire.

Also, tomorrow, there is a full solar eclipse on the peak day of the meteor shower. I don’t know if eclipse darkness is sufficient to see falling stars… but you never know. If you’re in a narrow canyon or deep mountain valley, look at the surface of a still pool of water during the eclipse. You might see reflections that you can’t see with your own eyes. And a falling star in the middle of an eclipse! Wouldn’t that be something!

Still, I wouldn’t plan on that one. If you want to see this gorgeous spectacle, then get up early. Or stay up late. The best time for viewing the Perseids is between midnight and dawn on the 12th. If you live in eastern Asia where the Moon does not go dark until 2:36am on the 13th, you may be able to see the thinnest sliver of the Moon rising before the Sun as fireballs are radiating across the sky from the northeast. If any sky photographers get a picture of that, please share!

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If you are getting up early to watch the skies, start looking for the end of the Dog Days, heralded by the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, in the pre-dawn skies. For my latitude this will not happen until around August 15th, but those further south may already see the Dog Star in the night sky. (This explainer has a table, near the bottom of the page, that shows the heliacal rising of Sirius at a given latitude in 2026.) However, the Old Farmer’s Almanac claims that the Dog Days end today. Not sure what they mean by that…

Because of many factors — precession, calendrical shifts, and so on — the Dog Star reappeared to Roman eyes, after its daytime sojourn, right around the beginning of August. For Rome the Dog Days ended with July. Those who had fled the urban heat dome in July returned with the Dog Star and the watery public festivals that preceded its rising. The lethargy of summer was shaken off and people settled back into routines.

The last echo of this return to work is the European school schedule. We like to think that the academic year begins in early autumn to make room for the agricultural year, but that doesn’t quite make sense, does it. First of all, until recently very few farm kids went to school. But it’s the timing that rings a false note because this is when the intense work of harvest begins, not ends. In the south, the orchards demand hours every day right through September. In the north and in places that grow maize, the grain harvest is at peak intensity in August.

No, the summer vacation is more a relic of urban peoples than rural, and largely the wealthy who had time and lands to spare. This is when the patricians would vacate Rome for their summer villas. Later in history, this is when the royals abandoned the urban castle and shifted the whole edifice of nobility off to cooler climes. It was also the peak time for war, and second sons were shipped off in droves to stake a lord’s claim to something or other.

When the heat slackened, they drifted back to the city and the pace of urban life sped up once more. For the children of the Enlightenment and Victorian wealthy in the earlier days of public education, the return to town, and their parent’s return to the hectic schedule of being rich, at the end of the Dog Days brought the inevitable carriage ride off to school — as much to get the kids out of the way as to train them for adulthood. But it seems to have been true of true academics, even as far back as the Greeks, to start the course of training after the heat of summer relents. As these were neither children with busy parents nor laborers with duties, it is likely the school year (such as it was) was tied to the urge to leave the city when the heat became too much. When the Dog Star left the daytime skies, it was deemed safe to return to the city, and schooling began once more.

But only for the elites. The real agriculturalists did not get a summer vacation. The plebs and urban laborers similarly did not get days off, though the relentless need of the wealthy was taken off somewhere else for a time, easing the burden on the urban working class in the Dog Days — at least those who weren’t forced to follow the needy wealthy off to their summer retreats. (Because patricians don’t fend.)

This pattern is not much changed in nearly three millennia. When the Dog Star dogs the sun, wealthy urbanites take off for summer leisure (as opposed to autumn, winter and spring leisure within the city). The pace of life even in places like Manhattan slows a bit in summer, becomes more erratic and more human-scaled. Those who could no sooner afford a week or two in Aruba than take off for the moon remain behind and keep the necessary work humming along, but just enough, never more. You are liable to find locked doors posted with summer hours. Construction sites are hilarious — especially in this age of personal screens — with one guy wielding a tool and the rest standing in what shade they can contrive. In Albuquerque there is a running joke: takes twenty paychecks to dig a hole in July, just one in October.

But the work in the kitchen never completely relents. The work of feeding and cleaning and caring for bodies is never done. The wealthy don’t do this work, and so they don’t see it. They believe that summer vacations are the norm, even as they spend money on the labor of others every day wherever they are — and complain loudly when they encounter closed businesses and locked doors, in vacationland and urban homeland alike. The hospitality industry must always, everywhere be waiting on their every whim — and so the plebeian workload is viciously increased in congenial summer climates…

In places like Vermont…

Though, thanks to the many effects of collapse manifesting in the world now, tourism is down substantially worldwide and particularly here in Vermont. This is both a blessing and curse to tourist economies. The curse is that there is not as much money spent in Vermont in the Dog Days these days. But then Vermonters don’t benefit much from tourist dollars anyway, as most of the resorts and expensive rentals are owned by people who don’t live here. So maybe the dwindling tourist trade is a weak curse.

The blessing is that we don’t have to deal with tourists as much anymore. The ultra-wealthy are the only ones who can still afford to take themselves off to vacationland… and the ultra-wealthy generally don’t visit Vermont… Vermont being rather uncongenial to the billionaire class… So our Dog Days are just hot now… no longer belabored…

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These days, the ending of the Dog Days does not end the heat of summer. It’s still 80° at midnight here in Vermont. But this is the beginning of the end. Not so much because Sirius and the Sun are no longer in the sky at the same time, but because the Sun is no longer in the sky as long each day. After Sunday (the day after my latitude’s ending of the Dog Days), there are fewer than fourteen hours of daylight in a Vermont day. Or, put in tree terms, there are more than ten hours of darkness. Trees count the dark hours. They wake up with the shortening nights of springtide, and they begin to yawn when the nights stretch out again in autumn. Maples, in particular, start shutting down photosynthesis in their extremities when nights are longer than ten hours. So this is when we start to see a brush of color in Vermont. Regardless of Sirius. Regardless of the weather. It’s just time…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026