Backyard Sky-Gazing Leads to Meteor Sighting

I was sitting out in my backyard around midnight last night on one of my days off from work (tonight is the other one), enjoying the unusually clear skies, a relief from the rain and clouds we've been enduring night after night here in the Gainesville area for the last couple of weeks, and thinking to myself about assorted things...I call it "free-association brainstorming"...when in the low eastern sky I saw a meteor streak toward the south.  It started out in the constellation Aquarius (just south of Pegasus) and petered out near the first-magnitude star Fomalhaut in Piscis Austrinus...and was very bright.  I had thought to myself that I once again missed the annual Perseids meteor shower, which had peaked a couple of nights ago while the skies here in Gainesville were overcast.  But this definitely was a Perseid "fireball": it radiated away from Perseus, the epicenter of this shower.  I didn't observe any more meteors after that, but I was happy to have at least experienced this one, and it was impressive...

The effect of finally having a clear night sky to gaze at was only slightly marred by the bright gibbous moon that tended to make the fainter of the stars less visible.  The standouts were still there for this time of year: overhead was the summer triangle of first-magnitude stars Vega, Altair, and Deneb and their associated constellations Lyra (the lyre), Aquila (the eagle), and Cygnus (the swan), respectively.  Facing north I made out the circumpolar constellations of Cepheus (the king) and Cassiopeia (the queen), while I already mentioned the presence in the east of relatively faint Aquarius (the water carrier) and the more prominent Pegasus (the flying horse), with its signature asterism, the "square".  And then there was Fomalhaut of Piscis Austrinus (the southern fish), the brightest star in the autumn evening sky.  Good to see some of my celestial "friends" again...

As I write this while sitting at Panera on Newberry Road around 6 pm (the Starbucks I usually go to was packed), it is storming outside, with no end in sight.  But we'll see what it's like later on at night, when I like to drag my chair out to the middle of the yard, sit back, train my eyes on the heavens, and muse...it would be nice, though, if that dog at the home on the other side would stop barking at me...