Tonight is the peak night for the Gemini meteor showers. I went outside for a few minutes and I saw my first shooting star hopefully I'll see more. If you're in the east it should start about 9 p.m. - face North and hopefully you'll see one. They are estimating between 20 and 40 meteors an hour.
Thanks, Tony. Nothing so far. It's supposed to peak here at 2 am. I'll give a better look later tonight. There may be too many lights in town.
I sure did. I stayed out about 15 minutes I saw another two shooting stars.I approximate their size using my calibrated eye. HaHa The first one I saw was maybe an inch and a half, the second one was maybe a half inch, the third one was absolutely beautiful it was a golden yellow color about 7 or 8 inches long. Halfway through its track it went out then came back on.
I saw three, my daughter went out and she saw 2. I saw one gold yellow color and 2 white, my daughter saw 2 Green.
I saw a few, as well as a couple of airplanes brave enough to be out there last night. I could have seen more but the moon was so bright...
Yes the moon does hide meteors with low magnitude. Still was a great show I always enjoy them. There was a lot of planes out last night here also, one was fairly low and heading right at us, It put a ginormous bright white light on I don't know if was a Searchlight but it was bright, strange.
Some years ago I went to a border town in Arizona for work. Since I had never been out that way, I rented a car for the last leg of the trip (a 3 hour drive) rather than take the puddle-jumper so I could experience the scenery. This was at night. So I'm driving through some pretty remote areas, and there are "casual exits" off of the highway that seemingly went nowhere. I looked and I looked, and I could not see any lights or signs of life anywhere near where those exits likely went. All I could think was "That's a great place to set up a telescope."
I would love that I've had a scope since I'm 10 years old.When I was 13 my family spent 2 weeks upstate NY., I brought my scope, the stars were like diamonds. The constellations were so clear, like being in a planetarium.
I had a Unitron scope, I wish I still had it. It also had a sun filter, it had a bracket with a screen, you I could project the sun onto the sceen to view sunspots. I would put an index card or paper on the screen, I then would trace the sun and sunspots onto it. I wanted to follow the movement of the sunspot. I had loose leaf book filled with these traces plus my drawings of the plantets. Crazy huh.
I used to get the astronomy cards from my mother's Red Rose Tea Bag boxes. They had a book to paste them in, kinda like trading stamps.
Some of the pictures look very familiar but I've never had any of those stamps, we drank Lipton. Later we bought red rose tea for the bone china animals.