Quote:
Originally Posted by bnorth
That would be very cool to see. I will have to look it up but it is supposed to be cloudy here for a few days. 
The coolest thing I have seen looking into the night sky was the 2001 Leonid meteor shower. It was raining meteors. |
Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was outside with the dogs and looked up, and my first thought was "Why is the exhaust from that jet Fluorescing at night?", then I noticed the exhaust trail was a bunch of single lights moving in unison...and the next thing that crossed my mind was a jet plane pulling along a huge light up banner in the sky...like the small planes you see pulling advertising banners in touristy beach locations.
Once I found out they were satellites it made more sense...but was somehow less fun once you knew what they actually were. The fun was in actually not knowing what they were...which is a weird psychology I think we have as humans.
I remember the Leonid showers. Me and my wife woke up our then 6 year-old daughter around midnight to drive up to a lookout point at a state park that was open for just this occasion.
We get there around 1am thinking we'll have the place to ourselves, and the road up to the lookout was just packed with cars. At first we were disappointed, but then we ended up having a sort of surreal, communal experience with hundreds of other people at the top of a mountain around 1 to 2am in the morning. Reminded me of one of the earlier scenes in "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", with all those people drawn to the same lookout area at once.
We watched with all those other people as it looked like flaming boulders were falling out of the sky.
Been lots of meteor showers since, but I've never seen or experienced anything close to that...before OR after.
On the flip-side, I do still get excited when I look up and see something I haven't seen before. Even if it's just a satellite, a space station...or a string of 50+ satellites all in a row.