Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

« Links for 11th Augus... | Main | My Favorite Firefox... »

Monday August 14, 2006

Perseid Washout

On Friday evening and Saturday evening, Duncan and I went out to the back garden, put some mats on the ground and lay down and looked up at the stars. We were looking for Perseid Earthgrazers.

As the linked article states, our best chance was to do this before the 87% full moon came up and made the viewing next to impossible. At that earlier time of night (8:30pm to about 9:30pm) our chances of seeing any were pretty remote.

We ended up seeing only one on each night. We did see 2-3 of what looked like faint slowing moving stars, but these weren't going in the direction of the meteor shower, so I suspect they were man-made satellites.

While we were lying there, Duncan felt the need to talk about anything and everything astronomical, that he knew the remotest thing about. At school, or on the TV, he must have seen a video of a supernova (presumably 1987A). He asked if it could hurt us.

Oh boy. Where to start. I had to explain just how far away it occured, hopefully in terms he would understand (light from our Sun takes eight minutes to arrive at the Earth and it's only 93 million miles away). He seems mollified. Then his kid-like ADD kicked in again. He asked about travel to the stars and we were off into science fiction.

He was a tad disappointed in the meteor shower (or lack of it). Next year, about this time, there should be no moon in sight, so the Perseids should be very impressive. There's also the Leonids in November. I actually watched those myself about 4-5 years ago, and it was something else. The problem there is the possibility of cloud cover (and not so clement weather).

[Technorati Tag: Astronomy]

[Technorati Tag: Meteor Showers]

( Aug 14 2006, 08:06:55 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [4]

Comments:

I'm glad you saw something. I've yet to see a Perseid this year in the south-east of England. After weeks of hot weather and clear skies, things turned really nasty and it bucketed it down as I describe in my own blog. Paul

Posted by Paul Sutherland on August 14, 2006 at 08:46 AM PDT #

It wasn't the best of showers, but I saw 3 from Glasgow, Scotland after about an hour. There is a live audio feed from a radar station at http://www.roswellastronomyclub.com/radio_meteors.htm

Posted by Bruce Cowan on August 14, 2006 at 08:53 AM PDT #

I don't know if it's just our location (Mansfield, Connecticut, USA) but we've been able to see shooting stars most clear nights this summer. Long before the so-called perseids. We just have to lie in the grass and chat with our eyes on the skies and eventually we catch one out of the corner of our eye. It's nothing light the showers I've seen, where there are constant simultaneous shooting stars, but once we're tuned in, we see one every 15mins to hour, depending on the night. Maybe it's because there's no smog...

Posted by Erik on August 14, 2006 at 10:10 AM PDT #

It was a washout in New Hampshire as well due to cloud cover -- which cleared about the time the moon came up. :( Hopefully next year!

Posted by jd on August 14, 2006 at 02:30 PM PDT #