Meteor Showers in Australia

Knowing my current luck, there is a thread already in existence about this... which my search missed... (let me know...)

For all those who love shooting stars...


THIS WEEKEND .....
Saturday to be particular, there is a Perseids meteor shower. Look to the northeast, with the best veiwing in the hours before dawn.
Perseids are said to be a fairly prolific shower orginating from the Perseid cloud and happening every year starting from about mid July (peak activity on August 12th) They are called Perseids because they appear to be coming from the constellation of Perseus, and produce about 60 meteors a hour. The full moon will unfortunately dull out the stars.. but I saw an absolute beauty of a shooting star last weekend, despite the light sky.

I havent found a very good website to keep an eye on the happenings in the sky.. I'm just trying to gather information from all over the place. I will try to keep this thread updated.. for there are some even more prolific showers coming up.. and a partial lunar eclipse. So maybe we can share information here.....

I saw a couple shooting stars over the top of the movie screen @ the drive-in last weekend... I forgot to ask if anyone else saw them...

thx, pip... I'll try keep an eye out for this...

mmm stargazing!

will check it out miss

Pat, gita and paul saw them...and i might have if i wasn't sleeping in the backseat!

but i am certainly going to check out thee showers!

YAAYYYY!!! I'd never seen a "shooting star" before... I was so excited... and then I forgot to share it...

I have watched this shower before with Dev Kev when he was in australia. It was amazing...I think all up we saw 17 'shooting stars' awesome times.

Gah! Ryan just accidently deleted the post I was almost finished!!!
tch tch tch...

So anyway, as I was saying.... for those of you who didnt make it out to see the stars last night.... I envy you're nice un-interupted sleep.

We drove up to Mount Nebo lateish last night. Saw a couple of frogmouth owls, a lot of bats, a crazy man wandering the bush with something behind his back, a bandicoot, a weird fox-dingo thing (or maybe it was just a dog) some batty bird looking things. We got kinda lost, and almost ran out of petrol. Froze our titties off, and eventually saw 3 meteors in the hour + we were there.

They were kinda cool....

There's some more dates coming up soon that I shall enter soon.

sounds love-ly pip... except maybe the crazy man bit...

keep those of us that were "stuck in front of a pc, sick as a dog, working", posted...?

nice work, ry-an...

Yup.

August is great for Meteors.

And to think, it's really just Earth backing through the same general clump of space garbage every time it hits this point in it's revolution.

last night my mate had a party and although it was in the city we dont get much haze and there were very few clouds. i didnt see any asteroids but there was this awesome ring with the moon exactly in the middle of it. it kinda looked like a ring of clouds, but you could tell it wasnt cause it didnt move off center in relation to the position of the moon. i dont know what its called but apparently its something to do with the ozone and happens very rarely, it was pretty cool.

never heard of it, majestik, but also sounds lovely... I gotta spend more time looking @ the night sky...

in fact... the last time I sat and stared @ the night sky I wrote a song... start to finish... I really gotta spend more time looking @ the night sky

We try to catch all the big storms if the weather is good. The perseids were supposed to be peaking last night in U.K. and we were out anyway so had a look. Saw about a dozen, but they were REALLY bright big ones, which made up for the fact that there weren't that many

mmm what Pip says.

3 shooting stars.. and they were pretty zippy. Would probably have been a bit better if the moon wasn't so full.

But! I saw my first bandicoot!

oh yes! after walking home from the party i saw a possum, in the city! in a tree! but when i sat down to watch him he didnt move, so i left him stuck in a tree. silly possum.

i was going to go out and look but it was totaly clouded over and chucking it down with rain and high winds...........so i thought me will stay in my nice warm bed

meteor showers this time of year are gorgeous in Canada too...Last night was one of the best of my life! Wow.

We went to a local lake, and had a picnic in the middle of the night, out on the dock all snuggled up in duvets, watching the shower... made wishes after wishes, singing star songs.Heaven.

Then once the spectacular silver moon rose past the trees enough to make it a bit too light to appreciate the meteors
( though some you could actually see the reflected falls in the lake surface!) , we went for an amazing skinny dip swim. The water was so warm and silky, and you could just float on your back and watch the sky. Got out, invigorated, wrapped up in the blankets again, and had some hot tea and chocolate. Bliss.

One of the many many things that made it so amazing, was that we had put my friends child to sleep early, then woke her up specially for this experience. She is just five, and had never seen a falling star for real, never skinny dipped, so the whole thing just blew her mind.Laughter carried all across the water... We were like five year olds all three of us, contagous excitement!


Perfect!!!!!!

DON'T look at the metior shower, you'll go blind and not be able to see the triffids coming to get you



ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnn awayyyyyyyyyyyyyy

they're triffods man. triffods.

*scratches head* i always thought it was "day of the triffids" not triffods...............i could be wrong

I didn't even get the chance to try and see anything,, blooming low clouds over my way since friday,, still there now

I went out at 4:30am saturday morning and saw nothing, then decided to lie in my backyard and saw 8 over 2 nights! They were beautiful!

Awaken:
7 Sep 2006 - Partial Lunar Eclipse
(Saros 118, umbral mag. 0.190, max. eclipse 18:51 UT
partial: 18:05:03 UT to 19:37:41 UT)
A very slender partial lunar eclipse will be visible over Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. With a magnitude of just 0.190, the partial phase won't be very easy to see; but the shading caused by the penumbral phase should be visible to careful observers.

Was the possum called blossom? It would be nice if it was. It'd be a bit like the snake called jake or the eel called neil or the aardvark called...I don't what he was called actually

Thanks Firetramp. So, do you think its worth getting out of bed for? Sounds like it will be just like a normal moon thats not quite full yet.

Mr Majestik.. you should check out Brisbane.. the possums are evvvveryywhere - people have started catching them and serving them up in restaurants now.

The aardvarks name was mark..

There's heaps of dingos at Mt Neebs, and lots of mongrel mixtures too. We ran across a whole pack running down the road one trippy night...literally running... they were upwind of us and didn't realise we were coming... we scared them as much as they scared us and they scarpered into the bush...! Normally thought they are good things to keep away from...

And possums bloody everywhere in Brisbane.. make yr life a misery banging across the roofs and peeing in yr ceilings. BWe had a psycho possum used to come into our house.. half its face chewed off.. augh. Found him on my BED one night!!!
Abd you know whats weierd about Europe.... hardly any birds!! I've seen about 10 the whole time I've been here and most of them were seagulls who for some inexplicable reason were in the middle of Germany?!?

Ahhhh ! crazy stories Gabe!

I missed meeting you before you nicked off oversea's, although I've now met all your lovely daughter and all your housemates, taken 'le grande tour de chataux de l'gabe (for pete's sake someone help me with my french pro-nouns) AND heard so much about you...

Cant wait to meet you when you get back. Will probably do plenty of catching up at Common Ground!

Do you guys get the amazing phosphurescence (sp? Someone please help me with words like that!!) in the ocean there? The glowing algae?

I thought the night with the meteor shower was the all time most incredible night ever for me.... But last night was even more so!

I dove in the ocean in the middle of the night, in a quiet private bay, and it looked like a meteor shower all around my body! I was covered in trails of water stars! Every move I made left a path of galaxies whirling around me. It was utterly breathtaking. For a while I floated, and watched stars above, bathed in a magic flowing glow...

I got out,freezing but exhilarated,, and spent a while dropping cookies into the water to see the fish flicker up and get them, in these waves of sparkles ...

Woke up with bits of the ocean still in my hair, and the kiss of starlight on my skin...
Bliss