Sunday, August 11, 2013

Perseids 2013 – Tonight (Aug11-12 after 2am) is the peak!

The sliver of a moon sets mid-evening … the skies appear to be clear for tonight here in the mid-east of Canada, and the Perseids will peak tonight.

AWESOME!

Last night, as we left a friend’s daughter’s stag and doe party in Almonte, Karen and I looked up to see a crystal clear Milky Way Galaxy in the center of town, the parking lot across from the Royal Canadian Legion. I commented that the Perseids would peak in a few days (not knowing that it was the next day in fact) and so we looked up for a while. After a few minutes, Karen got into the car and I turned to get in but saw a flash across the sky just above a closed bicycle store. I won’t regale you with the language I shouted when I saw it (something along the lines of holy f-----g s--t!) … but it got Karen back out of the car.

So we watched for a while longer and she saw one above the store as well, and I saw one across the sky in the North East skies (we had been looking East-South East so far.)

At the last moment, I saw one more tiny one out of the corner of my eye (so it may have been a hallucination) and thus the final tally is 4 meteors in the space of about 10 minutes around midnight (not a peak hour, which starts are 2am) …

2013 is going to be a banner year!

Here is a shot of the Perseids from 2012, shot inside Ottawa … I hope to do better than this tonight.


Nikon D700  Nikon 50mm 1.8D  1600iso  f/2.8 10s