Perseids! (Gadget-free geekery)
Give yourself 2 Geek points if you know what the Perseids are. Another if you were aware that the Perseid meteor shower was this weekend. A full ten geek points if you actually went out and made the effort to watch them.
Mr. & Mrs. Alex and geeklings went out to see the show, making what was probably a longer-than-necessary drive to Joshua Tree National Park to be assured of clear skies free of light pollution from streetlights. And it was indeed a show worth the drive on a “school night.”
Astronomy is hobby that has as many gadgets available to purchase as you have money to buy. Telescopes, obviously, but also software and cool combos like this tool from Celestron. But there is plenty of astronomy to get involved that doesn’t require spending a dime.
Before going further, a few ground rules: Unless you actually live underground and come out only once every 17 years to mate like a cicada, then be aware that there are cool things to know and be able to spot in the sky, no matter where you live. The moon is visible to nearly everyone, and if you can see any stars at all, you can see most of the planets as they make their way across the sky. Learning a couple of the more basic constellations will put you ahead of 90% of the class, and being able to casually mention, say, that the Moon is passing within 2 degrees of Jupiter tonight will impress your friends and astound your neighbors. Maybe. It’s fun to me, anyway.
So first stop is the Night Sky section of Space.com. Though a bit heavy on the ads for Starry Night software and other products, the site has full coverage of upcoming events in the night sky, and well as pics and reports of recent ones. There are downloadable charts of the night sky based on your zip code, and reports of upcoming events. The site is also heavily cross-linked with spaceflight and general science blogs, which is cool.
Second stop is Universe Today, which blogs several times a week about what’s going on not only in the night sky but in space news generally. There is even a free ebook to download that covers backyard-astronomy events throught the end of the year.
The third stop is to get yourself some astronomy software so you can figure out for yourself what is going on in the sky. Starry Night is the premier dual-platform astronomy package that has been around for at least a decade. Several different versions are available at different price points and a demo is downloadable from Space.com. You can do just fine with the cheapest version of Starry Night, but I would be remiss if I did not point out that free options exist for perfectly good astronomy software as well. Stellarium is by current fave, and at 0 dollars, Mac, Windows or Linux, it is clearly woth a shot.
This year’s Perseids at Joshua Tree were clearly a treat. Meteor showers, generally speaking, are usually events that you do have to go a bit out of your way to observe. Meteor storms like the 1833 Leonids are rare and exceptional, with so many shooting stars, observers thought the sky was “on fire” and some felt the world was ending. The typical experience is more like mine, where upon I get to the point of being comfortable in my camp chair, staring up at the night sky, one of the geeklings asks for a snack, and while I am fiddling in the backpack, I hear a chorus of “Oooh! That was a good one!” By the time you look up, it’s gone. That’s not really fair, in all honesty–I saw a number of stunners last night. Bright, long-tailed white streaks whose tails incandesce momentarily before it’s all gone. There’s no time to say, “Hey, look!” You see it or you don’t. There’s no Tivo for a meteor shower.
There can be exceptions, however. Way back when, in the summer after my freshman year of high school, I was camping on Washburn Island on Cape Cod with some high school buddies, enjoying some illicitly bootlegged Boone’s Farm Apple Wine (beggars can’t be choosers). Sitting around the campfire, surrounded by trees and situated about fifty feet inland from peaceful Waquoit bay, someone said, “Hey, check out that shooting star!” We all looked up, not really expecting to be able to find it through the tree branches and focus on it through the Boone’s Farm before it faded away. But we saw it. Then we got up and ran, barefoot, in the dark, to the beach to get a better look. And it was still there, streaking across the sky, bright white and with a long tail. I can’t remember how long it was there after that, but it was a good long while before it headed down to the horizon and faded away.
Listening to the radio the next morning with dry mouth and pounding heads, the perky DJ announced that some Cape Cod residents may have seen quite a shooting star the night before–yep, that was us–and it turns out, it was actually a piece of Skylab that had fallen off and burned up in the atmosphere (this was at least 2 years before the entire vehicle was de-orbited and burned up over the Indian Ocean in 1979).
So look up. And mark your calendar for November 17 and 18, the date of this year’s Leonids.
Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Leave a comment
