The Perseid meteor shower peaked on our last night in the Sierra. We slept at over 10,000 feet elevation that night and the skies were clear. The Milky Way stretched from mountain-blocked horizon to mountain-blocked horizon, and there were as many stars visible in the sky as I have ever seen.
I got up a few times during the night to watch the sky, but as usual I was unimpressed with the meteor shower show.
When one hears “Meteor Shower”, one might expect something like a water shower where the sky is filled with many meteors every second. Alas, a “good” showing for a meteor shower is an average of around one per minute, and that’s about what I saw when I got up. Interesting for a few minutes, but as the near-freezing temperatures penetrated my light jacket I only stayed out for about 5 minutes and saw about 5 shooting stars.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Don // Aug 14, 2013 at 6:22 pm
I’ve always wanted to take the next day off and drive up into the high desert or even a mountain and watch the Perseids but after reading this maybe I don’t really want to.
I know it typically peaks at 100 an hour at the very heaviest so once a minute or so is not far below that. I would like to try to capture some on my new fisheye lens though. That might be kinda cool.
2 Daryl // Aug 14, 2013 at 6:42 pm
They say that back in the early 90’s the comet connected with the Perseids passed through the solar system and the meteor show was much better — several hundred per hour and many of them bright fireballs. That would have been interesting.
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