Perseids from a field with no name
From the garden I see maybe five Perseids an hour on a good night, because the garden has a street lamp and the street lamp has opinions. So on the night of the twelfth I drove forty minutes out to a field I have used before, which has no name, a gate that is never locked, and a view down to the horizon in the north-east.
The difference two magnitudes of sky makes is hard to overstate. The Milky Way came up out of the haze as a structure rather than a suggestion, with the dark lane through Cygnus plainly visible. I sat in a reclining chair, pointed my feet north-east, and did nothing for four hours.
| Interval | Meteors | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 23:00–00:00 | 9 | Radiant still low, long slow trails |
| 00:00–01:00 | 14 | One fireball, bright as Jupiter, left a trail for two seconds |
| 01:00–02:00 | 19 | Best hour, several in quick bursts |
| 02:00–03:00 | 19 | Dew on everything, including me |
Sixty-one in four hours, against a predicted rate that would have given maybe twice that from a genuinely dark site. I will take it.
Two practical notes. First, a reclining chair is not a luxury, it is the entire difference between four hours and forty minutes. Second, a red torch is useless if you then look at your phone to log the count. I used a pencil and paper, which stays readable and does not reset your night vision every time you check the time.