Stargazing

Last night was the final day to catch some of the meteor shower from the annual Perseid shower.  I heard about it on the radio and went out the night before to watch for it, but I didn’t know what to look for.  So I decided to make more of a date of it with Rebecca, and after the kids went to bed, I grabbed some blankets and went out to our back yard, and we simply laid down on the blanket in our dark yard, and watched up in the sky.  The weather was really nice for it; there was a slight breeze, but it was relatively warm for 11:00 at night.  Only a few of our neighbours left their porch lights on, so it was pretty dark.

When we first watched the sky, Rebecca pointed out the hazy area, which I explained was the Milky Way.  I’m more used to staring at the stars than she is, since I go out at nights and walk Chewy.  Then we looked around at the stars and realised that we didn’t know enough about the constellations to really appreciate those thousand points of sparkling light.  We saw our first shooting star (how exciting) and watched the stars, taking advantage of a chance to talk a bit as well.

Rebecca saw 17 different meteors, of which I saw around 12 of them (what can I say, between star-gazing and Rebecca-gazing, I wasn’t always looking up) but I saw two that she didn’t see, so all within around 40 minutes, we saw 19 of them.  It was really fun!