Perseids Meteror Shower

Remember that shooting star I told you about last week?

You know the one I told you about here?

Well I did a little research and found out it was a part of the Perseids Meteor Shower which occurs every summer.

This year, it peaked on August the 12th. We decided to go on a little field trip to see how many shooting stars we could see. It's the beauty of homeschooling. We can stay up all night watching meteor showers!

I knew we needed to get away from the city where the sky would be darker, but I wasn't sure where we were going to go. I innocently put on my facebook status that we were looking for somewhere out of town to go look at stars where we wouldn't get arrested for being in someone's yard in the middle of the night.

One of my co-workers commented right away that I could go to his house and watch from his front yard. Yes, facebook on iphones is prohibited at work, but I'm sure he was on a break... or lunch or something.

Anyway I googled his address. He's got one of those common names like John Smith, Dan Brown, Charles Wilson... but I find what I think has got to be his address. I put the address into Daphne (our GPS) and off we go. Thank God for technology.

We settle into the front yard of my co-worker and *quietly* get our sleeping bags into star gazing position. "Charlie", "Dan" or "John's" wife is asleep inside, so we are careful not to disturb her slumber. We can see the lights flicker on and off occasionally, assuming my friends wife must have a pea sized bladder or something, we don't really give it much thought.

Some of the kids scream, giggle and wrestle in the front yard... all jacked up on the Coke I let them drink to stay awake at 1am.

I get exhausted from saying "Sshhhh." "Lay down." "Quit it." "Settle down."

Some of them couldn't stay up this late even with a full pot of Ethiopian coffee...

The horses in the field next to our star gazing area were quite disturbed that we were there. They were neighing at us and pushing on the fence with their butts. I seriously could hear the fence cracking. I thought for sure they were going to stampede. Do horses stampede? I'm not sure, but I wasn't going to risk it. I considered sharing our M&M's with the horses, but wasn't sure what that might do to them. The kids were screaming and eventually Josh hid in the car. Sissy.

I sent a text message to a friend at work and asked him to tell "Charlie, Dan or John", that his horses were freaking out and they look like they want to hurt us.

The message I got back was quite unsettling.

"Um... He said he doesn't have any horses."

We quietly got our sleeping bags together, loaded up our stuff and got the heck out of not Charlie, Dan or John's front yard.

Oops.

All in all, we saw at least 30 shooting stars over the hour that we spent star gazing. I can't wait until November for the Leonids Meteor Shower. It was a magical night!

Here's a pic of the Perseids Meteor Shower that I didn't take, but think is absolutely beautiful.