Waiting for the Perseids

At 2:15 this morning I came in from 25 minutes of sitting on the patio in my dressing gown watching the Perseid Meteor shower. This year had been predicted to be particularly good with 150 - 200 meteors per hour, but unfortunately in this cloudy, light polluted corner of the world I only saw eight. However two of them were spectacular, including perhaps the best I've ever seen. Presumably it had split into two high in the atmosphere as it produced a pair of very close, parallel tracks across 20 or 30 degrees of sky. An amazing sight. However the clouds had rolled in and I made my weary way to bed.


This evening I'm back outside waiting for the sky to darken. To fill the time I'm reading "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson, a book in which the earth is made uninhabitable by an immense meteor storm...