Skip to main content

Shooting Stars

Apparently, Luke does not trust me.  He wanted me to wake him up at 1 this morning to watch the Perseid meteor shower, but as he was telling me to "make sure to wake me up," he realized that he has his own alarm clock.  He set it and was ready to go.  I asked the girls if they wanted to be woken up and they declined.

He may have had reason to not believe that I would wake him up.  We have tried to wake Luke up in the middle of the night for other astronomical events but he is notoriously difficult to wake up.  I recall shaking and yelling, only to have him roll over and groan.  Last night I was prepared to go into his room to turn off his alarm when he didn't wake up this morning, but it turned out not to be a problem---he was bright eyed and bushy tailed after only about 30 seconds of alarm. (Note: the alarm woke me up without any trouble, even from the other room.)

We went out to the darker end of the street and lay down in the damp grass.  We saw maybe 5-10 meteors in the half hour we were out there.  Not as many as we might have seen in a darker place: there is a lot of light pollution where we are so that's not surprising.  I am thinking (only thinking) about asking the neighbors to turn off their outdoor lights tonight.

Just as we were about to go in, a huge, bright meteor crossed the sky, leaving a visible thick tail.  It was clearly the best one of the night.  I am thankful for our atmosphere, and thankful for the comet that leaves its debris in the earth's path.  Meteor showers are awesome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.
8 comments
Read more

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!
2 comments
Read more

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...
5 comments
Read more