I held my last class night in Basics of Astronomy for this summer on Thursday evening. As my students and I were outside reviewing the constellations we'd studied and viewing the 5-day-old moon and Jupiter with the 14" CETUS telescope, we all happened to be looking north at about 9:30 when a nice, bright meteor started into the atmosphere, seemingly just for us. It skirted across the sky parallel to the horizon and made two or three little "skips" as it tried to decide whether to skip off our atmosphere back into low-Earth orbit, or to go ahead and let itself be captured for the finale. As gravity won out, the tiny, bright, pinpoint became as red as any meteor I believe I've ever seen and it died in a little terminal burst of light. It was SOOO nice....one to remember for a long time.

I just came back inside from about a 10 minute walk outside on the observatory grounds at about 3:40am. I watched as much sky as my aching neck and back would allow and counted 12-13 meteors in that length of time. It's always been interesting to me how meteor showers can produce "doubles" and the occasional "triple" as two or three specks of dust come in side-by-side to end their long cold flight in a burst of fiery light. I saw one such double, a perfect set of twins equally bright, equally long, separated by 3-4 degrees as if in lock-step. But as far as this Perseid meteor shower goes in general, it was a pretty normal shower.....a meteor every 45-60 seconds, most only as bright as the commonest of stars, and 4 or 5 as bright as the brightest stars. If I'd had the patience and the relief from pain that I wished I'd had, I might have expected to see 80-90 in an hours' time.

But those things are a rarity now, and even though I saw but a few of nature's little gems of the night, I'll remember this year's shower from that very first one....that bright little "skipper" that originated somewhere in the NE towards the area of Perseus where it should have begun, and that last little hoorah as it melted away, giving a few beginners and a salty old dog something to talk about and remember for a long time to come.

Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) has a short movie of a brilliant fireball over Israel's Wise Observatory during the Leonid Meteor Shower of November 2001. Click here to view the movie....(it may take a few seconds to load completely)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050812.html