The NSA probably knew about it first, but I learned that the 2013 Perseid Meteor Showers were imminent because chatter on the Web reached a fever pitch yesterday.  Okay, I said to myself, I need to drag myself out of bed in the dead of night to see them.

Meteors, as we all know, are bits of cosmic dust and debris from outer space that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and appear as streaks of light as they burn up.  The Perseid meteors seem to originate from the constellation Perseus, hence their name.  The shower occurs each year when Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the wake of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

These showers are not rare, but they are certainly worth seeing, so around 2:30 this morning, I stumbled out of bed, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and went to stand at the door to my deck.  I gazed toward the northeast, and amazingly enough, I saw three meteors within the first five minutes.  It was a bit chilly, so I  went back to get a quilt and then brought a chair out onto the deck, but I sat and stared for another fifteen minutes and didn’t see another one.  Then the sky began to cloud over, and I went back to bed.

I’m aware of the superstition that one should make a wish upon a shooting star, but I don’t know when or where it originated, and probably no one else does either, though many have wondered about it.  I should have made three wishes, but I was so awed that I wasn’t thinking of anything but the beauty of the night skies at that moment.  Certainly artists and poets have marveled at shooting stars as well.  In fact, I found this poem by Sara Teasdale in a collection of her poetry that I put together when I was in elementary school:

The Falling Star
I saw a star slide down the sky,
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quck to hold,
Too lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to make wishes on
And then forever to be gone.

I had thought I might photograph the meteor shower, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it with my camera, a point-and-shoot Canon SD850 IS Digital Elph.  If anyone has some advice for me, please leave a comment.  As long as you’re not trying to sell something, your comment won’t be blocked by the blog’s spam filter.  Thanks very much.