Sunday night, for the peak of the Persied metor shower two of my room mates and I drove out to Nahant, MA to watch. Nahant is this little outcropping of rock connected to the north shore by a causeway. It had a good, dark, northeasterly view, and it was close. It was amazing how many more stars were visible even just an hour out of the city. Of course being on the beach helped much. Unfortunately the Northeastern research center out there has some bright lights that were hard to avoid.
We first tried to avoid the lights by heading down a forested path, it abruptly ended with a huge, imposing door built into the hillside. We turned back, and headed up a trail that went up to the top of the hill. We were almost at the top when I came within a foot of running into a perfectly constructed spider web spanning the path. It had about a 1in square spider chilling in the middle of it. It seemed as though it’d worked pretty hard on the web so we turned back.
We took all our gear, blanket, flashlight, water, and binoculars up the road a bit to the next beach down the road, again on the northeast facing side of the island. There was a guy with a laptop out on the closed trunk of his car. He told us he’d seen a bunch while he was on the beach, some 25 feet below the road. On his suggestion we ignored the barricaded stairs and went down. We saw maybe 15 meteors total during the hour plus we laid down there. Two or there of which were very bright, and left some impressive streaks. Eventually some little critters found us and we broke camp.
When we got to the top of the stairs the laptop toting stargazer had been replaced by a somewhat inebriated “on vacation” girl from down the street, who claimed to be a lawyer in Boston. She had her sister and a cute dog with her, and we chatted for a bit, mostly about how we didn’t have any drugs. While we were chatting possibly the best meteor of the night crossed my eye. I pointed and spoke and we all caught a fading glimpse. All and all one of the most successful meteor shower watchings I’ve had in recent memory.