With all the light pollution here, the air traffic movements from Gatwick, and some clouds and rain in the evening I didn’t hold out much hope of seeing any of the perseid meteor storm tonight, but I was pleasantly surprised.  The rain stopped, the clouds cleared and even with the light coming from windows and street lights I saw a few meteors.

At first I was a bit worried. Wearing varifocals means that everything in even slightly peripheral vision was odd. I kept thinking I saw something but it was an effect of the glasses, then I was worried that I might not see the real thing because it might not be exactly where I was looking – even from the confines of our garden the sky is pretty big.

And then the first one flew across so brightly I realised I was being silly: no way I could have missed that.

I only saw a few, but even the normal sky was impressive enough.  I don’t look up very often and had fogotten just how brilliant the night sky can be.  I am no astronomer.  All the stars are just stars to me, but even so I just felt so small looking up there and thinking how big all those points of light really are.  It was awesome enough as it was and the meteors were just the icing on the cake.

While I was looking up I could totally understand how primitive or uneducated people can feel the need to invent a god to explain it all. How must it all look if you have never had any sort of street lighting and can always see the stars clearly?  And then one night its different: there are dozens of stars moving or one that looks brigher then normal.

Also surprised how bloody cold it was considering it is supposed to be the height of summer.