11:41 AM
What a show.

I've cross-trained with late-night writing projects, built up a nice little habit of playing Vice City, and established a solid Critic/Sports Night/Batman middle-of-the-dark TV watching block. So when the choice came to stay up or get up, there was no choice at all. I was a little worried about yesterday's rainy, cloudy weather, but around midnight the clouds blew over and the sky was crystal clear.

The upshot? 3:30 this morning found me awake and ready in a local park with a bunch of astronomy geeks waiting for the sky to fall.

I was planning on watching the Leonids in a park a couple blocks from my house until I heard an astronomy professor on public radio talking about this gathering in a park a couple blocks further away. (That's Madison for you--lots of parks.) Somehow they convinced the city to turn off all the lights in the park, so aside from the bottom one-third of the sky being obliterated by lightbleed, it was a great viewing spot. They also brought a couple telescopes so that folks could look at Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons while we waited. Neat stuff.

One of the profs had an antenna set up and explained that when the meteors started coming, they would create ionized trails of gas in the atmosphere that would allow radio signals from Ontario to reflect over the horizon to Wisconsin. While everyone spread out blankets and chairs--except me, who didn't think of such things--a speaker on a card table hissed quietly.

A dozen people quickly became two, then three, and as the expected peak at 4:30 approached there were well over a hundred people waiting. Blanket-wrapped people staring up at the sky; a nearby woman noticed that it was just like the scene near the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the U.F.O. fanatics gathered at the edge of the highway. Looking around and seeing silohuettes framed in the light of the full moon emerging from the night fog, crunching through the dew frozen on the grass, I was reminded of the poster shot from Dawn of the Dead. She was probably more accurate.

Suddenly I started to hear pops and snippets of music from the speaker. Looking toward Leo, nothing--but in my peripheral vision, more sensitive to light, I saw faint trails beginning to appear. Finally, an ooooooo! from the crowd as a bright line crossed part of the sky. Then another. And another.

It was never quite hyperspace from Star Wars, but over the next forty-five minutes I saw more meteors in one period than I ever have before--at least a couple hundred, including a couple spectacular ones with trails colored red and green and blue. When the speaker finally fell back to a hiss, when my feet got too cold to stay any longer, when I home and got into bed and had a chance to think...I decided it was the best reason to be an insomniac I'd had in quite some time.

What a show.

(Pics and links on APOD and NASA's Leonid site for the interested. Also, a description of the Leonids as seen from the space station.)