The Random Bit Bucket: Moinak Ghosh's Weblog

I was lucky. For the first time in my life I was able to watch a meteor shower. The Perseids meteor shower peaked on Aug 12th which was last Sunday and there were good views from the Northern hemisphere. I am currently in the US and was in Mountain View, California last weekend which had excellent clear skies.

I got to see at least 5 large meteor streaks within 20 minutes, near to the constellation of the Big Dipper in spite of the hotel lights. It was very exciting for me. I had a few rare glimpses of meteors in the past, but nothing like what I saw on Sunday. The other time I had similar excitement was a long time back when I was able to watch Halley's Comet using a home-brew refractor telescope that I had constructed out of cardboard tubes for holding blueprint paper, a 0.5 diopter (2m focal length) objective that my dad got made after haggling with an optician store and a 6x eyepiece.

I am not too much of an Astronomy hobbyist, but do a bit of reading of Astronomy and Cosmology topics.