On both Friday and Saturday morning, Bill and I got up at 3:30 to go hang out on our beach house deck in hopes of catching a glimpse of one of the Grape-Nut sized rocks shooting through the night sky.
With hopes high that the beach would provide a very dark sky for optimal viewing of the meteors as part of the Perseid Meteor Shower, we set our alarm so we could get up after the moon set when viewing would be at an optimum.
On Friday morning I counted 61 meteors during the 45 minutes we were hanging out on our deck. Excited with such great success, we eagerly got up again the following morning. when meteor viewing was supposed to be optimal on the east coast. The sky was just as clear as the morning before, but the meteors were a lot more shy and I only counted 32 during our two hours outside. While out, we walked down to the beach for Bill to take pictures with his fish eye lens. If you look toward the bottom center of the picture, you’ll see one of the meteors.
Photo Credit: Bill
Later that day, Miles called to tell me about his last-minute stargazing excursion with our friends. Too excited to let him tell me why he’d called, I blurted out about seeing a ton of meteors shooting through the sky as my friend and I headed out on our 6 AM run along the parkway in our neighborhood.
Yes, through pure dumb luck I’d witnessed shooting stars lighting up the sky when I wasn’t even expecting them. Poor Miles and his meteor chasing sidekicks had wasted precious sleep, driven several hours round trip, and hadn’t seen a single meteor…
- Questions:
- Did you see the Perseid meteor showers?
- What cool things have you seen in the sky while on an early morning or late night run?
- Have you ever been to a planetarium?
Yes, that is what happened to the 4 of us who took hot coffee, blankets, lawn chairs and a feeling of “hope” that after 2 hours of driving we would be away from ambient city light and be able to watch hundreds of meteors sail through the bight sky providing hours of some of natures best entertainment. We may have seen one or two, but we weren’t sure. We were falling asleep. It was a cold night after a few hours we headed back to Maryland in time to get maybe 4-5 hours of sleep that night before work the next day.
And the frosting on the cake was that Debbie walked out her front door, went for a neighborhood run and and saw many of those shooting starts that had eluded us.
By the time I saw those shooting stars, you guys were back in bed trying to get a little sleep before heading off to work. It was all about the timing, and dumb luck just happened to be in my corner that morning! 🙂
I SO wish I would have seen this!
It was pretty cool!
[…] There’s been something magical in a celestial sort of way during our visits to the beach these last two years. Last summer, Bill and I got up at 3:30 AM two mornings in a row to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower, and I wrote about our phenomenal experience in Watching A Meteor Shower While On A Run. […]