Saturday night quite possible may have been the last warm summer night I get this year. It is now mostly dark by 9:30 and the night air is feeling a little more fresh. I even had to scrape frost off my car windows one morning last week. It has even been cold enough that there have been rumors of some overnight snow. It is all good though. As nice as the evenings are in July, even at midnight it is not completely dark. Saturday was a rare combination of completely darkness, cloudless skies and warm overnight temperatures. We had spent the hiking in Jasper National Park so I was a little tired (we spent a total of 8 hours driving and 3 hours hiking), but I did not want to waste the night. I thought that finally I might be able to see a deep sky object in my telescope.
Once again my little telescope let me down. I tried to find M103 in Cassiopeia and M81 and M82 in Ursa Major. No luck. I tried to get a look at Mars but is was very low on the horizon and quickly moved behind some trees. I decided to move onto some naked eye viewing. I was looking around the summer triangle (Deneb, Vega and Altair) when I saw a relatively slow moving meteor make it way NNW. It had a decent size trail was was visible for about 1.5-2 seconds. That alone made it worth the effort to go outside.
Just before I went inside a lone Canada Goose did a flyby. It was odd enough for a goose to be flying around a midnight but what made this even more out of the ordinary is that it circled over head a couple of times before heading on its way. Perhaps he was out for one more night of goose merriment before heading south, had a little too much quack grass and had some trouble getting back to the pond.
One that note I decided to pack up and go to bed. Before I called it a night I scattered some Astronomy magazines around the house left open to some “random” telescopes advertisements. Christmas is only three months away after all.
