Thursday, August 10, 2023

 

It’s not an omen I hope, the fog that blankets (isn’t there a better verb for what fog does?) the sky this morning at 3:30am. I happen to be awake, and this is the week, even the hour, for best viewing meteors bombarding our sky. Maybe this is the time to remember that when these flying fireballs are in our atmosphere they are meteors. If—dear goodness, not here, please—they do impact earth, then and only then are they meteorites. Arizona’s “Meteor” Crater is misleading, should one care about accuracy. Meteors are space rocks, clumps of dust and ice usually not much larger than three feet in diameter.  

 

Comets are rock and ice plus gas, frozen leftovers from the formation of our solar system. Comets can be as large as ten miles wide. Leftovers they may be, but like strutting peacocks in a farmyard, when a comet orbits the sun, when its ice warms and gases evaporate (I think I have this right), a comet can spread a tail of dirty snowballs, meteors, over millions of miles of space. Imagine the peacock able to eject eye-spots from the 150 feathers in his train. Like a meteor shower, he would deserve attention. The Perseid Meteor Shower is the best shower of all. But for the fog.

 

We are in the week when Earth blunders its way through a cloud of meteor debris the Comet Swift-Tuttle scatters from its tail during its annual orbit of the sun. We tend to think of the sun as belonging to us, right? It’s so easy to be narrow-minded.

 

If we are lucky, when a meteor collides with our atmosphere, we have about one to three seconds to catch a glimpse of its bright burnout. Count. A meteor travels at about 44 miles per second.

 

The radiant point for these meteors, which determines the direction we should be looking, is just there, just above the Perseus constellation which is itself is found under the very familiar W-shaped constellation, Cassiopeia. Keep your eye on the sky this week. The shower peaks after midnight, Saturday, August 12.

 

p.s. the sixteen-mile-long comet Swift-Tuttle (whose remains make the Perseid meteor shower) takes 133 years to orbit the sun. The comet itself will be visible again in 2025. Stay alert.

 

Here, the poem I wrote from my first ever visit to Washington state when for the first time, at the edge of Dyes Inlet, I watched a powerful display of meteor madness. It was a warm August night, and there was no fog.

PERSEID METEOR SHOWER

1983

 

THERE’S A TENT MEET TONIGHT

AT THE CORNER CALLED SKY;

IT’S CROWDED INSIDE

BUT THERE’S ROOM.

 

WHAT I NOTICED LAST NIGHT

AS I WANDERED NEARBY

WAS THE VIBRANCE, THE SPARKLE,

AND PLAIN MOCKIN’ OF DOOM.

 

BUT OLE PREACHER PERESEID CRIED,

“YOUR TIME’S NEARLY ENDED!

SO, WE’LL SING THAT REFRAIN ONCE AGAIN!”

 

SHOULD HAVE SEEN ALL THOSE STARS

SQUIRMING HARD IN THE SKY,

BEING WARNED TO REPENT FROM THEIR SIN.

 

WELL, SOMETHING WAS WORKING.

SOME SPIRIT WAS MOVING.

THAT REFRAIN SEIZED THE CROWD

WITH ITS POWER

 

FOR NIGHT AFTER NIGHT

TO THE PREACHER’S DELIGHT,

THOSE STARS WALKED THE AISLES

BY THE HOUR.