
Icon says it all ->
The BBC is pulling its annual trick of promising skygazers a "dazzling display" of Perseid meteors this week, as the Earth passes through the trail of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. Peak meteor activity will be tomorrow night (Wednesday August 12) from around 2300 UK time, and enthusiasts can expect "at least one every few …
It's unlikely I'll get to see anything here either (Persian Gulf). We generally get clear skies, but with the ever present dust in the atmosphere, only very bright items show up in the night sky. Even Jupiter / Mars / Venus are not always visible.
At least it won't be raining though; forecast is no rain for the next 5 months.
"have you not used a 'comments' system that uses your gmail account to authenticate???"
I don't have a Google login or gmail account. I have noticed this problem elsewhere with web pages that use Google Calendar to advertise their events.
Such a URL works ok when clicked on the calendar web page - but has to be modified before it will work when pasted in a browser's address box. The secret seems to be in retaining parameters for the registered email address for the calendar owner plus a calendar ID - but also removing some of the other keyword parameters.
"[...] even if you don't use it! makes using other 'comments systems' a lot easier.."
That's the reason I don't have one. I never use the same login that can be correlated across several comment sites. If a site only allows Google, Facebook, or Twitter logins then I don't comment.
Paranoid - moi?
Agog with anticipation we queued for a couple of freezing hours in 1986 to get a look at it through an observatory telescope. You all know the punchline - yep, just a fuzzy dot against a lot of black. I thought about getting a t-shirt printed with just that and a big arrow pointing at it. You can make up the slogan yourselves ;-)
My son got an unremarkable telescope for xmas a year or so back (M&S kids special). Haven't yet managed to see Saturn as anything but a blurry dot, although the grey (light polluted) London skies are likely helping out there. Jupiter is a bigger dot, albeit one that you can't quite see any discernable stripes on, although the four big moons can be reliably seen.
Best thing was a few months ago when I managed to get it lined up to see Venus as a crescent. Although aligning it manually is a bit of a barsteward, especially since things walk out of the field of view fairly quickly with the more powerful eyepiece in.
Last year, with clear skies, I saw about one Persied every 10 minutes....
Yep, and yet it was still the most people we ever had when we held our open house at the Observatory on top of Davey Lab when I was in college.
I've never understood why the Leonids gets hyped EVERY year. For my money the Orionids are a better shower. The storm associated with the Leonids is every 33 years, with the last one in 1999 and that one was a bust.
According to the always reliable, never wrong, BBC weather website the skies (here in the south east anyway) are clearing between 9pm and 11-ish pm tomorrow night so if I can just find somewhere locally in the wide open spaces of South London with low light pollution... fuck it, I've got no chance have I?
May as well go to the pub and see if I can see any on the stagger home at kicking out time.
Metcheck has issued a weather warning for Thunderstorms/Heavy Rain/Gale Force Winds, starting tomorrow night and ending on Friday night.
http://www.metcheck.com/UK/warnings.asp
Like Neil says, I should have had a look last night but was too tired after another long(ish) day at the office and decided to go "tomorrow night".
It seems I repeatedly forget to factor in the weather.
It's either I'm too optimisitic or this is just my Britishness showing.
Many years ago we sometimes had a communal evening BBQ in the African veldt. It took a while for the logs to burn down to glowing embers - and daylight changes to darkness very quickly at those latitudes. On a moonless night the skies were black velvet covered with sparkling diamonds. When you put your steak on the mesh to cook you could see its outline against the charcoal's glow - but it proved impossible to see if it was rare or cinder charred.