PhotonStopper

Catching up on postings, I’ll start with last night’s efforts watching for meteors. While waiting for the sky to darken, I enjoyed a beautiful sunset over the lake at Letha House Park West, a Medina County (Ohio) Park System property. (I have after-hours access.) I’m glad I arrived early even if the wait for darkness was all the longer.

A Showy Sunset made Waiting for Meteors a Pleasure.

The annual Perseids meteor shower was highly-anticipated, not only because it reliably produces many bright “shooting stars,” but because Moon was in its new phase August 11 — no natural light pollution! Unfortunately, with thin haze and clouds overhead, human-produced light pollution from Medina, Ohio was quite bad! Still, we did see several “fireball” meteors — flashes brighter than the planet Venus — and I did capture a few. Best of the night showed two, yes two (2) meteors glowing at the same time! This is a stack of two sequential 15-second frames and both meteors appear in both frames at different stages of their burn! Close-up viewing of the streaks shows faint lines leading to the flares of these little fireballs heading generally left to right (east to west) in this crop from a 15mm fisheye lens field of view.

Pretty Pair of Perseids: Two Perseid meteors glow high in the southern sky over constellation Sagittarius.

Now, I’m assuming these are meteors; there’s something odd about the timing and appearance of the streaks and flares. There would have been a one- or two-second delay between the end of the first exposure and the beginning of the second, which seems long for a meteor. No Iridium satellite flares were predicted via Heavens Above. Time was 10:30, Saturday, August 11.

Meteors became a bit more frequent around midnight, which is typical, but the atmosphere was playing havoc with our observing. We left the observing site at about 1:00 AM with clouds building ever-thicker and lenses fogging up. It was a fun night watching for meteors… even if, or maybe because, they were a rare sight!