The Perseids are coming! The Perseids are coming! (meteor shower, a spectacular show)

My wife and I left home (near San Francisco) @0500 Saturday morning got back home about an hour ago. Because of the smoke we continued north past the Black Rock Desert, to Rome and Jordan Valley OR. The smoke was pretty bad over Donner Pass and in Reno and Winnemucca, but not bad at all where we were.

We got up at 0100 and watched for several hours. Our night sky was dark and fabulous with lots of stars. Have to agree with JKellyMap, the meteor shower was a bit disappointing. Some were excellent, but the frequency was low. There was about one every 5-10 minutes. Compared to the last time we saw the Perseids when there were several per minute.

Oh well. 1,200 miles round trip for that.

But my wife and I brought our list of things to discuss and the hours on the road were productive. And I’m glad we were together.

I’m in a relatively sparsely populated area of the country so I drove 20 minutes outside of town to a nature area and lay on a blanket looking up at the sky. Saw several small meteors and one bigger one. Also saw many bats swirling above me and heard an owl hooting.

two nights ago I was able to stay out and I saw four spectacular meteorites before I went to bed.

Overall we saw about 30 shooting stars in 3-4 hours. One was especially spectacular. Really grand.