Perseids
On Saturday night, I went to watch the Perseid meteor shower. The county naturalist opens a park after dark every year for this purpose; last year it was a sleepover, but this year it was only supposed to go until 2 am (and in fact, she kicked everyone out at midnight because it was cloudy and she decided she wanted to go home).
I brought my 405 nm (Blu-ray purple) laser pointer, to see how it compared to the green laser pointers people use for star gazing. Purple scatters off of air/moisture a lot more than green, which would make the beam easier to see, but the eye is much worse at detecting purple than green. Also, it turns out that the purple scatter is pretty similar in color to a cloudy sky, so the beam was really hard to see when the sky wasn't clear. When the sky was clear, I found it only slightly harder to see than the green, but everyone else disagreed and thought it was much harder to see. Maybe it was because I was holding it, so I had a viewing-angle advantage, or maybe it was because I'm female and so have better color vision, or maybe it was because I'm 30 years younger than the people who were trying to look at it and have better vision in general.
The other thing I learned was that potato chips are faintly phosphorescent. Tons of things are fluorescent--if I shine my purple laser pointer on them they'll glow in some color other than purple. Phosphorescence--having that glow last after I turn the laser off--is rare, though, and I'd only previously seen it in actual glow-in-the-dark things. The bag said the chips contained only potatoes, oil, and salt, so I don't know what was glowing. Then I tried on someone's popcorn, and it was also phosphorescent, but even fainter still; the popcorn had a much longer ingredients list with tons of chemical preservatives, though, so that was unhelpful. Unfortunately, my laser pointer fell out of my jacket on the way home (I think in my friend's car, but we never found it), so I haven't been able to test which ingredient in potato chips glows in the dark.
("I can test this when I get home."
"Do you have potatoes at home?"
"Yes."
"You do??"
"...Yes? Of course?")
As for the meteor shower itself, the clouds cleared up around 10:00. I found a place away from the trees, and as it happened, away from people, and laid down on the grass for about half an hour, just watching. In that half hour I saw 11 meteors, which was more than anyone else there. Over the rest of the evening I saw another 4, putting me at a total of 15; I think the next highest count was 9. I attribute it to being away from people, because when I'd talk I'd be tempted to look in people's general direction, and I'd get distracted. As it was, for half an hour my full concentration was on the sky. I think that's what happened to other people. We were out somewhere remote enough that two or three of the meteors I saw were not part of the Perseids at all, but were just random meteors going in other directions. All the big ones--and about half the fainter ones--seemed to be Perseid meteors, though (that is, their path seemed to originate from the general direction of the Perseus constellation).
In the dark, the teenagers and college students could tell I wasn't an old person (most of the people there were either college-or-younger or over 40), but they couldn't tell I was much older than them, so they invited me to hang out with them a bit. They were talking about superheroes, though, which made me feel kind of old, because superheroes were at a nadir of popularity when I was a kid, and I barely knew enough to follow the conversation and certainly not enough to contribute. My youngest siblings would have felt much more at home. After I wandered off, the conversation switched to being about Avatar, but I was talking to the other adults so I didn't try to join back in.
When the clouds came back around 11:00, some people declared it to be an intermission. The county naturalist suggested we could sing songs, but no one could think of anything, so she led us in "Take Me out to the Ball Game," since that reminded her of intermissions. I said I was sure I knew some star-gazing songs. All I could come up with was "Though My Soul May Set in Darkness," but it seemed appropriate enough, so I sang it. To my utter shock, the county naturalist knew it (although, unsurprisingly, no one else did). When I suggested we do it as a round, she demured, saying it was a hard one, especially if we were going to have to teach people. She did invite me to a roundsing at her house next weekend, though. Apparently some women's group she's in hosts monthly roundsings, with a mailing list and everything. I've been a regular on her hikes and nature walks for like four years, but of course this never came up. I've been living in Michigan for 8 years, and this will be my first time ever going to a roundsing here.
So, between seeing 15 meteors, discovering that potato chips glow in the dark, and being invited to a roundsing, the outing ended up being a lot better than the cloud cover had led me to expect.
I brought my 405 nm (Blu-ray purple) laser pointer, to see how it compared to the green laser pointers people use for star gazing. Purple scatters off of air/moisture a lot more than green, which would make the beam easier to see, but the eye is much worse at detecting purple than green. Also, it turns out that the purple scatter is pretty similar in color to a cloudy sky, so the beam was really hard to see when the sky wasn't clear. When the sky was clear, I found it only slightly harder to see than the green, but everyone else disagreed and thought it was much harder to see. Maybe it was because I was holding it, so I had a viewing-angle advantage, or maybe it was because I'm female and so have better color vision, or maybe it was because I'm 30 years younger than the people who were trying to look at it and have better vision in general.
The other thing I learned was that potato chips are faintly phosphorescent. Tons of things are fluorescent--if I shine my purple laser pointer on them they'll glow in some color other than purple. Phosphorescence--having that glow last after I turn the laser off--is rare, though, and I'd only previously seen it in actual glow-in-the-dark things. The bag said the chips contained only potatoes, oil, and salt, so I don't know what was glowing. Then I tried on someone's popcorn, and it was also phosphorescent, but even fainter still; the popcorn had a much longer ingredients list with tons of chemical preservatives, though, so that was unhelpful. Unfortunately, my laser pointer fell out of my jacket on the way home (I think in my friend's car, but we never found it), so I haven't been able to test which ingredient in potato chips glows in the dark.
("I can test this when I get home."
"Do you have potatoes at home?"
"Yes."
"You do??"
"...Yes? Of course?")
As for the meteor shower itself, the clouds cleared up around 10:00. I found a place away from the trees, and as it happened, away from people, and laid down on the grass for about half an hour, just watching. In that half hour I saw 11 meteors, which was more than anyone else there. Over the rest of the evening I saw another 4, putting me at a total of 15; I think the next highest count was 9. I attribute it to being away from people, because when I'd talk I'd be tempted to look in people's general direction, and I'd get distracted. As it was, for half an hour my full concentration was on the sky. I think that's what happened to other people. We were out somewhere remote enough that two or three of the meteors I saw were not part of the Perseids at all, but were just random meteors going in other directions. All the big ones--and about half the fainter ones--seemed to be Perseid meteors, though (that is, their path seemed to originate from the general direction of the Perseus constellation).
In the dark, the teenagers and college students could tell I wasn't an old person (most of the people there were either college-or-younger or over 40), but they couldn't tell I was much older than them, so they invited me to hang out with them a bit. They were talking about superheroes, though, which made me feel kind of old, because superheroes were at a nadir of popularity when I was a kid, and I barely knew enough to follow the conversation and certainly not enough to contribute. My youngest siblings would have felt much more at home. After I wandered off, the conversation switched to being about Avatar, but I was talking to the other adults so I didn't try to join back in.
When the clouds came back around 11:00, some people declared it to be an intermission. The county naturalist suggested we could sing songs, but no one could think of anything, so she led us in "Take Me out to the Ball Game," since that reminded her of intermissions. I said I was sure I knew some star-gazing songs. All I could come up with was "Though My Soul May Set in Darkness," but it seemed appropriate enough, so I sang it. To my utter shock, the county naturalist knew it (although, unsurprisingly, no one else did). When I suggested we do it as a round, she demured, saying it was a hard one, especially if we were going to have to teach people. She did invite me to a roundsing at her house next weekend, though. Apparently some women's group she's in hosts monthly roundsings, with a mailing list and everything. I've been a regular on her hikes and nature walks for like four years, but of course this never came up. I've been living in Michigan for 8 years, and this will be my first time ever going to a roundsing here.
So, between seeing 15 meteors, discovering that potato chips glow in the dark, and being invited to a roundsing, the outing ended up being a lot better than the cloud cover had led me to expect.