Blast from the past - actually, two of them

19 August 2007

A metaphor for blogging?

Could be ... lots of little flashes as various people visit the blog, or as topics for posts appear briefly in the blogger's mind - and behind those, the great vast untapped universe....

Technical details: this, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website, is the result of combining a series of 30-second images of the night sky during the annual August Perseid meteor shower - comet dust burns up as it enters the atmosphere, and on a clear and moonless night, it's great to see - usually one flash at a time.

Marion commented that it looked like a cosmic sneeze!

This year the meteor shower was supposed to be especially good - and sure enough, I missed it again, either because of cloudy skies or because of simply forgetting. There's a very short timelapse video here (and probably elsewhere).  Hopefully that article (in The Telegraph, can nothing be trusted?) is the only one that confuses those two "astro" occupations:

"The Perseid meteor shower, one of the best-known among astrologists, " - tsk, tsk, Telegraph....

The second "blast from the past" goes back many years, to 1971, when ex-hubby and I were living with kind friends Jim and Betty in the small beach town of White Rock BC, in the month before going to England for ex-h's MA studies. We all took chairs and blankets outside and kept our eyes on the heavens. Perhaps we even saw a meteor or two; perhaps a bottle of wine was involved. After a while it got quite chilly and we gave up and went in.

Decades later I learn that the shower is best seen, in the northern hemisphere, in the hours before dawn. I doubt we would have got up that early....

Note to self: be in a dark-sky area next year ... and do something about getting decent glasses before then. You never know, the clouds might not get in the way. I'd love to see a shooting star - and/or a planet (Saturn?) through a telescope. 

Meanwhile the Astronomy Picture of the Day site continues to provide astro...y photos of wonder and interest - just look at this solar corona, it could be something (celestial phenomenon? he did a few of those) drawn by William Blake -