Meteor shower fun!

Yoohoo people! How are you all doing? I'm feeling soo good, I'm in love with the world! I'm having my morning cuppa coffee and just reliving last night's fun in my head. Yesterday, yahoo said there were gonna be meteor showers early August 12th. Obviously, I wanted to see it. So Jamie and me made plans of watching it. She was of the opinion that if we are watching it- then we have to do a thorough job of it! She's from the countryside and knows what a dark sky looks like. She says, you can see a lot more stars in the country, than in the city because of less artificial light around. First we tried our backyard, at midnite. Jamie wasn't happy with the darkness- so off we went in search of closest country we could find. A brief consultation with a friend revealed that Plain City might be a good bet. Our destination was Cosgray Park. 315N, 270 W, 33, on 161. We packed our blankets and pillow and off we went in search of this park at around 1 am. Plain city has a lot of corn fields. Finally, after half an hour of looking, we found a dark safe spot off the road, spread our blankets and lay down under the darker sky, staring at it, looking intently for shooting stars. Romantic as this sounds- clear skies, moonlight, sky filled with stars, there is a tad pesky reality to it- bugs! Buzzing in your ears, over your eyes. Manageable though. We managed to see about 15 of them. I wanted to sleep the entire night under the sky, I was so excited with the idea, but when bugs started getting in our hair- the plan got aborted.

Ideally, this is what I would have loved to see...


Source: http://www.kokeytechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/meteor-shower-photo.png

But what we saw was this..



I get excited about so many things, but I also realize that I am so ignorant about so many things...this event got me thinking- do I really know what are meteor showers? So I did a search and this is what I learnt..
Meteors are bits of rock and dust that plunge into the earth's atmosphere and produce a glowing trail when they excite gas particles. This is from a website. Personally, I think, the flash of light is also because of the friction the rock particles encounter when they enter earth's atmosphere. The Perseid meteors are bits of debris shed from the comet Swift Tuttle which takes 133 years to orbit the sun and last came close to the inner solar system in 1992. Its fragments hit the earth with a speed of 59km/second- causing most to disintegrate far above the earth at altitudes of 80-120km- around the edge of space at 100km. A typical meteor is the size of a pebble or grain, but creates a column of gas that is ten of kilometers long and hundreds of meter wide. Apparently, earth accumulates about 1000 to 10,000 tonnes of materials from meteorites each day. So my children- there's your science lesson for the day!
Yesterday Jamie and me went to the Indian store. We got samosas and Jilebis. Both are deep fried samosas are salty and jilebis are syrupy sweet. I love these things. More on these things post consumption.I gtg to school now to learn gel electrophoresis, work out and come home do job search, future search, ponder on how to make the most of this life...Have a great day!