As I mentioned in a previous post, I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend. The Perseid meteor shower peaked Sunday night/Monday morning, but the shower was going fairly strong Saturday night/Sunday morning. For the first time since the early 90’s I got a chance to sit out beneath the stars in perfect weather with no moon to watch a meteor shower.

There were a lot of cirrus clouds early in the night, but by 1 o’clock, the sky was crystal clear. Staring up at the sky, lying on my back, it was as if I were falling into space. We saw a great number of meteors and a couple bolides. A bolide is an especially bright meteor, which often explode and leave trails in the sky. All but one of the ones I consider bolides might not be considered that by many astronomers, since the definition is apparently fairly fuzzy. The one especially awesome I saw streaked across half the sky and flared three times before disappearing. It left a long streak that took several seconds to dissipate.

I had wanted to see at least one really good one, and got my wish.

I tried to point my camcorder at the sky and record it, but it turns out that it is useless for low-light scenes. I did take several pictures of the sky, though. Those will be posted (if anything turns out) when I get the inclination. Too lazy at the moment.

As for the rest of the trip, I got to spend a lot of time with my uncle Eric and saw my uncle Richard for the first time in a great many years (a decade or more?). I also got to see and hang out with my dad, which was nice, since we haven’t spent much time together for the past decade. Eric and I stayed up until 3 watching the meteors. The peak of the shower was a few hours later, but we had seen a lot and the dew was making us cold so we decided to pack it in.

Eric borrowed a small Newtonian telescope from someone so we did try to find a couple of interesting objects. Mainly, we looked at Jupiter and its moons. Three of the four Galilean moons were visible, with Io passing directly in front of Jupiter, so it was subsumed. We also looked at the Andromeda galaxy, but it was little more than a fuzzy patch.

We used a great open source program for tracking the position of astronomical bodies. Stellarium is a fairly fast download and is easily the best free program I have ever seen for stargazing. I highly recommend it.