Those Summer Nights

(Image credit: APOD)

Did end up seeing some Perseids last night, hooray! Went out with the ever-kind Alison to the CWRU Farm (of physics picnic fame), and we stayed almost until dawn because we never seemed to get either cold or tired. This is such a rare thing in stargazing, of course, that we hadn't really expected it to happen.

I saw a few straggler Perseids tonight as well, as I started running some tests for my senior project. This involved basically sitting on the roof looking at an oscilloscope wondering why on Earth various things weren't working, but I looked up on more than one occasion and was amply rewarded (even from downtown Cleveland!). I also checked in advance on Heavens Above, a nifty website that will tell you what satellites are visible from your location on a given night, complete with starcharts, and caught the International Space Station and space shuttle passing overhead, which is always fun! The two are docked and according to Heavens Above were passing over extreme northern Canada several hundred miles away- something that rather impresses me to be honest. All in all, a good pair of nights.