Dubious Quality

I've mentioned several times over the years that Michigan is the perfect place for all kinds of beautiful astronomical phenomena (Northern lights! Aurora borealis! Meteor showers!), but I've never see any of it because it's always cloudy.

Not Saturday night, though. 

There's an observatory only twenty minutes from Grand Rapids (who knew?). It's in the relative middle of nowhere, and it's dark. Really dark. It's the kind of dark you never see when you live in a city, even a small one.

Plus, outside the city, it's still. The stillness is a presence you feel, and after hearing big trucks and motorcycles and lawn mowers and leaf blowers all day, it was a relief.

I took Eli 10.0 to see a meteor shower once. It might have been this one, and I know I wrote about it, but we just sat on the car and leaned back on the windshield in the darkest place I could find near Austin. We both thought we saw a few meteors, but it might have been more wishful thinking than anything.

Saturday night, though, I saw five.

It doesn't sound like many, I know, but four were spectacular, with long trails across the sky lasting for several seconds. There were hundreds of people watching, and the collective "ooh" was fantastic.

Plus, I saw the Starlink satellites for the first time, and if you haven't seen them, they're mind-blowing. Thirty or so rows of satellites, two by two, brighter than any star, proceeding in a long, almost vertical arc across the sky. They seemed close, too, because of their brightness.

That's what it looked like to the naked eye, anyway.

It was all incredibly beautiful, and even though hundreds of people were there, no one was being an ass, which made it even better. Everyone just spread out their blankets or sat in lawn chairs and looked up at the sky.