Thursday night was supposed to be the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. This night was extra special because at sundown Venus, Saturn, Mars and the crescent Moon shone in the west in tight conjunction. I was still at work then but snuck outside for a quick view, then after work headed out for the show. The darkest spot I know within reasonable driving distance of my house is the gorge of Ceasers Creek below the dam and about three miles upstream of it's mouth on the Little Miami. A road winds steeply down to a parking area below the dam. The creek provides a big break in the dense forest canopy with a nice view of the sky and equally important, there is not a single light visable in any direction. I arrived about three am and waited less than a minute before a big bright meteor streaked accross the night sky. By then the sliver of moon was long gone and it was a pleasure to stand out in the pitch black night and stare upward at the broad band of the Milky Way crossing the sky.
The Perseid meteor shower is actually the debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Every 133 years the 17 mile wide comet passes by the sun and leaves behind a trail of dust and debris. When Earth passes through the debris cloud, tiny bits of cometstuffs hit the atmosphere at 140,000 mph and burn up in flashes of light. These meteors are called Perseids because they fly mostly out of the constellation Perseus.
Swift-Tuttle's debris zone is wide and the Earth spends weeks inside it so even though Thursday the 12th was the peak, meteors are common for several days to come. A close encounter with Earth is predicted for the comet's return to the inner solar system in the year 4479, Im awfull at math but the probability I read was one in some number way too big to pronounce. But after that predictions sorta break down and since the comet would strike the earth 27 times harder than the one that killed the dinosaurs, Comet Swift-Tuttle has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity". Though my guess is we will have killed ourselves off long before then anyways.
I spend alot of time every winter looking at the night sky from another dark sky spot, my cabin in eastern Ohio. What struck me most about the Perseids was that I must have seen 7 or 8 meteors that would have each by themselves been the highlight of my typical winter skywatching. I once caught the Leonids in November just right and saw literally hundreds and hundreds of meteors but none as bright as these.
I know your supposed to find some meaning in these bits of thousand year old space dust falling to Earth and I've read wonderful pieces conveying just that, but I have to admit that on this night at least it was just a peacefull way to spend a night outdoors. There is a wooden deck built out over a broad pool in the creek and standing there looking down I saw the reflection of a bright meteor flash across the inky blackness of the pool. I read everthing I can on space and am always impressed by the vast distances and the stories of trillions and trillions of stars. But somehow when I'm out there the night sky is just a part of the whole, like the wind in the treetops or the lonesome cry of an owl. I've always bought into the Native American notion that we along with everything else in the woods and in the river are just a tiny piece of the whole and the idea of the Earth itself as a tiny tiny bit of the universe just comes natural to me.
The next evening I set out with about five hours of daylight left for the woods. My plan was to scout out a promising woods for ginseng season which starts in a few weeks. It threatened rain but that seemed welcome as we have been stuck in a heat wave. As I locked the truck and shouldered my daypack a few big sprinkles fell and the wind began to pick up. I walked down a steep wooded hillside halfheartedly looking for ginseng and mostly just poking around. In the bottom was a dry creekbed about ten yards across and I meandered up the dry rock strewn bottom a bit looking for fossils before going up the opposite bank. It was raining much harder now and i heard lightning in the distance. I remember thinking I'll just climb the top and then turn around. By the time I topped out lightning was crashing all around and it was raining so hard it was hard to see. A big oak leaned over a bit and I backed up under it a bit for some shelter. I wasn't afraid of the lightining as this was just one big tree in a whole woods of big trees. It then began to rain even harder as the storm unleashed its full fury. It was becoming clear that this was one of those storms where rain wasn't measured by tenths of an inch but by whole inches and I was squarely on the wrong side of the creek unless I wanted to spend a very wet night outdoors. All the way down the hillside it continued to rain buckets and by the time I hit the creek there was a few inches of water now running over the rocks. I'd hit it a few hundred yards upstream of where I'd crossed earlier and the bank I needed to climb was a small cliff here so I began to wade downstream. By the time I got down to where I could cross where I wanted the water was midcalf and you could actually watch it get deeper steadily every few seconds. I was very glad to be across. I began the climb out to the truck. The sound of water running was now noticeable above the sound of the hard rain. Looking back down the steep hillside the creek that had been bone dry two hours later was roaring along five feet deep.
The road home crossed the stream again several miles downstream and I pulled off to check the creek. Here there was maybe three inches of water flowing. If it wasn't fast becoming dark I would have loved to have stayed and watch the oncoming flood that had almost caught me upstream come rushing by.
^ that line going straight up is the hours of my mini flood. Of course my little creek rose faster and more sudden than the river but all the weather service shows are the river levels.
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