THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER—

I went to my friend and neighbor’s, gentleman’s ranch Sunday evening to take advantage of his marvelous viewing conditions for this annual celestial show.

Norrie Tangeman is a retired architect just up the road and shares my limitless amazement of such visual marvels.

We started munching on the delights of the evening’s aerial performance with the planet Jupiter, a stunning jewel low in the southern sky. My relatively small but tack-sharp Meade ETX 90 EC telescope delivered the goods.

Even punching through that much of the Earth’s atmosphere due to the low viewing angle, we were treated to the detail of the planet’s bands. Four of its moons also put on a lively show.

Two of them were bright, crystal-like specks on the planet’s left and a third was spaced farther to the right. While we were discussing their orbits and—almost on cue—the fourth moon popped into sight after first being obscured by the giant planet’s mass.

Throughout the evening we continued to witness the changing positions of those moons in relation to their planet—a phenomenon early astronomers used to determine they were, in fact, moons and not background stars.

As we enjoyed the planetary show, the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus climbed into our northeastern sky and brought with them the radiant of the meteor shower which already was producing an occasional streak as the sky succumbed to total darkness.

And, with that darkness the wispy, cloud-like bands of an adjacent arm of our own Milky Way Galaxy came into view, a rare treat in that evening’s sky of near maximum clarity. That band of countless stars paralleled the meteors that pierced the constellation Cygnus on their brief, visible journeys.

More eye candy appeared in this same area of sky, The Andromeda Galaxy, the only item visible to our naked eyes that is outside our own Milky Way Galaxy and located at a distance that defies human comprehension; two and a quarter million light-years away.

With binoculars it appears as but a shadowy fingerprint on the celestial dome.

The sky was punctuated by a slowly growing quantity of meteors as the International Space Station joined our show. It came into view just above the trees on the northern horizon but its visibility was quickly extinguished--as I predicted--when the station flew into the Earth’s shadow.

I was tempted to let Norrie believe I was capable of cosmic magic, then, we shared a laugh over that foolishness.

As midnight slid by our optical tools were disabled by condensation and two old guys were left to quietly ponder the magnificence of our visible universe.