Last updated on September 18th 1999.
However, they were a few steps ahead of us because they were already showing their
videos. We watched and shared and admired their "spettacolo," and
although from their site they suffered from some patchy, thin cloud,
this in no way detracted from the "prickles behind the eyes" excitement
of seeing it all again, and anyway not all of their videos were
affected. We began to talk to one of them and he must have seen our
envy when he told us that two coach loads of them were leaving the
hotel in half-an-hour (at around 11.00pm) to go to a dark-sky site to
watch for Perseids, because he immediately invited some of us to go
with them, provided they had room to spare.
There was room for us and they told us they would be travelling about
ten kilometres from the hotel, and would return between one and two
o'clock. Tired though we were from late nights and early starts and
many miles of road and air travel, and packing to do before a ten-hour
coach journey the next day, this was just too good an opportunity to
miss. We gratefully accepted and six of us piled happily on to one of
their coaches. The viewing from the intended site was spoiled by a
light source so we moved on to a really dark site where the Milky Way
was peerless compared with anytime I have seen it from the UK.
We had barely alighted from the coach and were still acquiring our
night vision when we began to see our meteor shower. During the course
of the next seventy minutes or so I saw about twenty meteors. Other
people saw ones which I missed and I suppose the best estimate of the
total meteors seen must be put at between thirty and fifty. Almost all
of these clearly originated from the radiant but there were some
sporadic ones too. Most of those seen were of the usual 'fast and fine'
variety, which take less than a quarter of a second to cross five to
ten degrees of sky. I didn't see any extremely bright ones but I
understand that possibly six were seen that left a bright trail lasting
nearly half a second and the longest of these covered maybe ten to
twenty degrees. The Italians, being more demonstrative than we British,
vented their feelings by much shouting of "ecco l€" and "que bella" and
we became infected with their enthusiasm and joined in with their
joyful shouting.
We were observing from a roadside and we were forced to hide our eyes,
from time to time, as occasionally cars passed. Nevertheless, we were
very pleased with what we saw, especially as one of our party, Matthew,
had been unable to resist the temptation to bring his telescope and had
set it up by us. Firstly he showed us two globular clusters, M22 in
Sagittarius, and M13 in Hercules, then M8 which is associated with the
Lagoon Nebula, also in Sagittarius. Later we looked at the Pleaides and
also Jupiter but by then the seeing was not so good and little detail
was visible. The last object we tried for was a double cluster in
Perseus, NGC 869 and NGC 884, which we were lucky to catch just rising
above the rocks. According to Matthew the radiant's position was just
west of this cluster pair.
I know we were all tired and getting a bit cold and stiff-necked so
when the first coach left around one-thirty we were on it, very tired
but very happy, and very appreciative of our hosts' kindness.
NB