It’s all too easy to feel down in the dumps when the non-working hours in the day are spent in the dark. My mind tells me constantly that it’s bed time. My child, however, reminds me that it is not.
And I am very glad that he did on Saturday evening. I’m glad that my husband and I decided to stuff him into a car seat and drive to the entrance of Crippen Park, then walk into the meadow. If not, I would’ve never remembered to appreciate these long dark nights.
I didn’t know about the Gemenid meteor shower (an annual event that occurs each year when Earth passes through a cloud of debris created by the extinct comet 3200 Phaethon). But I couldn’t help but notice all the stars (or what looked like stars) shooting around the clear night sky. While perhaps there are places in the world where people could see the meteors flashing through the sky more clearly than I could, the view from the meadow was nothing short of spectacular.
The next day, I called up former planetarium director Robert Ballantyne and he told me that at one time, people were so keen on getting a count of the number of meteors that shot through the sky on such an occasion that they would form teams of eight, with each person watching a certain segment of the sky, and someone timing intervals and recording how many meteors each person saw at each interval. As Ballantyne was in Montreal at this time, the cold weather made the job particularly tough. The National Research Council in Ottawa, he told me, made it easier by providing “heated coffins” for sky watchers to lie in.
He also told me that some friends of his were keen daytime watchers of meteors. By tuning an fm radio to a station just a little too far away, they could detect meteors by listening for the seconds when the fuzz of the radio cleared up. This works, he says, because meteors ionize the atmosphere.
All of this information (plus one more tidbit: the earth gains about a ton of mass every day from debris that comes off of meteors) made my experience even more amazing.
So Saturday I was reminded that long, dark and cold nights are not all bad.
And if you missed the Geminid meteor shower, you haven’t missed your chance to appreciate the night sky: Ballantyne says that on your average clear night, you should be able to count roughly 7 meteors per hour.
Happy Solstice, everyone.
