(SNES) C'est la Vie

["Les Coleman" <les11@cox.net>]

I am truly glad we DID NOT schedule a Leonid Shower Watch at the
Observatory. In spite of glowing reports from various astronomical mailings,
and worse yet the local weather talking head saying get up and get out, I
never felt that this session would go down in the records as much, not the
brightest or the one with the greenest flashes or the one with the longest
lived trail. I was right although it may have achieved one superlative, the
one with the most hyperbole.

I did not pull an all nighter. I got up about three and moved out on our
deck where a lawn chair was set up for the cushions and blankets I had
stored by the door. It wasn't particularly cold, but the over all sky shine
was high. Even in the shady part of the deck, I could make out the
differences between red and green, a very bad sign for night vision. The
Moon was very bright. The clarity of the sky was poor, not cloudy but
exceedingly moist. This allowed the Moon to blot out everything dimmer than
about magnitude 2.5.

I saw a few faint streaks (Did I see that or not types).  I had to wait
until 3:28 for my first fireball, a lovely green yellow streak out of Leo
heading Moonwards. All right I thought, here we go. Mumble - wait - mumble
mumble wait yawn wait.
Then about 3:52 several streaks within a few minutes. More mumbling, more
waiting and a lot more yawning. Over the next 50 minutes, a few minor
streaks and one good streak. More yawning and I decided I would go inside
and partake of my favorite cold weather libation. Quaffing this delicious
fluid and restoring warmth to my chilled bones was a bad decision.
The next thing I knew it was 5:50. I had dozed off. I went out for the last
few minutes of relative darkness. Maybe, I thought, it will be like last
year when we saw meteors well after sunrise. Nope. Nada, Nichts and Zilch.

Les Coleman
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