This year I decided to try to see the meteor showers that are most visible every August. I went out a couple of evenings late at night before I went to bed to look for them the evenings before. One night I saw really bright streak that traveled a LONG ways and the streak from it was visible for around 10 seconds afterwards! That one was really neat!
Last night I decided to set my alarm for 4:00 this morning to see if my oldest 2 kids and I could see some good meteor showers. The weather was quite cool - probably close to the 40's. I dressed warm and got up at 4:00 to check it out before waking the kids just in case there weren't very many for us to see. Thankfully we have a great viewing spot on our deck of our house since we don't have trees around. I checked it out and found that they were streaking about 2 per minute so I decided to wake them up.
They woke up fairly easily and dressed into some warm clothes and I brought some warm blankets out. We sat out there on a table and I let them lie their heads down on my lap so they could see the sky better as they were most visible high in the sky. For the first 5-10 minutes we saw quite a few flashes of light and then they seemed to die out quite a bit. Both of the kids enjoyed it quite a bit and it was neat looking up at all the stars with their 2 heads on my lap and their enthusiastic comments. We also saw several satellites traveling across the sky.
After about 10 minutes the sky was beginning to lighten already for the new day so we went to bed. I know they're probably still out there some, but tonight it's rainy so we probably couldn't see them tonight and it seems kind of anti-climactic to go out again sometime but we'll see if the kids ask to try to see some more one of these days soon. It makes me interested in studying the constellations and astronomy a little more with the kids! We'll see if I decide to fit that in sometime. Maybe next summer we can do a little unit study on it!
that right up there was me Dustynne :)
forgot my name wasn't there.......!
by the way, thanks for taking us water-skiing! that was SO cool. I loved it!
Posted by Anonymous 
• Tue 14 Aug 2007 - Cool!