Starry Nights @ SFU: 2008 Perseids

Starry Nights @ SFU: Blogs & Pics - 2008 Perseids

High-resolution copies of selected celestial images are available for download from these blogs,
and print nicely on inexpensive photo paper with a basic colour or B&W printer.

Starry Nights @ SFU & CBC TV:
Perseid Meteor Watch at Spanish Banks Aug. 11 2008!

CBC TV was at Spanish Banks on the night of Monday August 11 to interview people watching the Perseid meteor shower. I was on hand to talk about the Perseids, along with Bill Burnyeat, an Astronomy Instructor at BCIT who has previously done Astronomy programming with CBC, and who was kind enough to invite Starry Nights @ SFU to attend (Bill also works at the Vancouver Telescope Centre). Bill and I were also there to represent the Vancouver chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. The CBC set up at 10PM, at the western-most parking lot at Spanish Banks, and uplinked interviews with Bill, myself, and Starry Nights @ SFU members Ronan Kerr and his Dad Scott. Thanks as well to our members Michael Levy, and Ian and Lindsay Allison, who also dropped by. A number of curious people who noticed the bright light of the CBC camera also paid us a visit. The CBC interviews aired on the midnight broadcast, one of the special short news segments that they have been featuring during the Olympics. I did not get a chance to see the news, since I took down my gear around 1AM, but I heard from a neighbor that our interviews did get on air! We saw well over a dozen very bright meteors during a surprisingly active interval between about 10 and 11PM, with relatively few meteors after that (meteor showers normally intensify after midnight, while this year's Perseids had been estimated to peak around 4AM). Ronan and I set up our telescopes, and Ronan treated us to a number of Messier objects. We also took note of a relatively dim Algol: this eclipsing binary star had a minimum just minutes before midnight!

I did not manage to take any pictures this night, blast! The frame above instead shows a beautiful montage of the 2004 Perseids, taken from an Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) feature. Click the image to link to that APOD posting. APOD just featured a image from Vancouver of a 2008 Perseid: click here to see that feature!

Starry-eyed
@ SFU since Nov. 2007