What a shower!

Perseids meteor shower, that is.

For once the weather gods smiled beneficently on Bath and we had a clear night for the maximum display of the annual Perseids meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Watched the skies after midnight for meteors. I was too lazy to get out into the countryside so spent an hour outside my home. As a consequence the radiant was over my shoulder to the north and I viewed the quadrant to the south west. The brightest star visible is Altair in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle). Subtracting the urban light pollution, the viewing conditions were ideal - no Moon, just Jupiter rising - and clear, cloudless skies.

As an experiment, I set my camera on long duration exposure and tried to over-ride autofocus and adjust the focus manually - though that was not completely successful. I took around 60 long duration (up to 30 second) exposures and captured one of the dozen or so meteors I witnessed with the last but third exposure. It's the faint streak of light running vertically down the shot to the right of the trees in the bottom right of the frame (I hope it is visible in this online reproduction).

It was good to remind myself of the sense of awe I felt as a child at the beauty and scale of the Universe. Blockbuster skiffy movies with stupendous digital special effects inure us to its nature but even an hour under a starlit sky can restore it. Knowing, though never truly comprehending, the scale of the distances between the stars; knowing the age of the Universe (13.75 ± 0.17 billion years); knowing the critical role of stellar life-cycles in creating the atoms of which we are made; recognising the continuing ability for new astronomical discoveries to amaze us, it is still a wonderful thing to view the night sky with the naked eye.