Planetarium and Perseids

Friday afternoon I woke up with a sense of purpose.  This time around I wouldn't forget the weekly planetarium show that Santa Fe College put on Friday evenings.  There were two shows, the first at 7 PM a look at the sky and interesting features and the second, at 9, more or less a light show done to the tune of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album.  I chose the former, going there again with Melissa.  James Albury of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium was there again as well, presenting the show.  He reiterated some things from our visit there three weeks ago and showed where the planets and moon would be seen for the next few days (Venus and Moon were close to each other in the early evening sky Friday tonight).  Albury had also brought in for display a 75-pound meteorite, composed of iron and nickel...and very magnetic...and very dense and heavy.  Melissa got a photo of it, as well as one of the facility's two projectors, this one the simpler non-digital model that Albury used for Friday's show.  The digital projector, he told me after the show, had the ability to show the movements of stars against the sky's background over spans of hundreds and thousands of years.  But for Friday we stuck with the analog one.

I'm going to try to make at least a monthly habit of dropping by the planetarium to see what's going on.  This month, of course...and the reason for the meteorite...was August's Perseid meteor shower, which I was just outside observing (at 3 in the morning).  The peak observing nights would have been tomorrow, but I'll be at work then.  In any event, I stood out there in my freshly mowed back yard under ideal cloudless conditions eyeballing the constellation Perseus for a good twenty-to-twenty-five minutes.  For my trouble I saw one clear meteor, a pretty bright and very brief streak of light left of Perseus in the vacant part of the sky between Perseus and Polaris known as the constellation Camelopardalis.  That was at 3:18.  Well, that's one more meteor than I believe I've ever seen with this, the supposedly biggest meteor shower of  the year...