Hmmm, Friday the 13th. The Geminids meteor shower peaks tonight. Now, my luck with meteor showers is uniformly bad, so much so that it’s a standing joke among, well, me, so I now consider this a regular state of affairs.
So, will the bad luck actually result in changing this? If I count on not seeing a damn thing, will the mystical daemons that assault people with trivial annoyances and the occasional assassination be fooled by this, and triumphantly, maliciously ruin my view of the stars with a bunch of streaks and perhaps even a spectacular bolide? I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?
The skies have been back and forth all week – they were quite clear last night, but it was cold enough and I had other projects that I wanted to complete (and did) rather than sit out on the deck and stare at the sky while freezing and watching the camera batteries die quickly (this is a trait of lithium-ion batteries; getting cold makes their power drops off a cliff suddenly, though it comes back up when they get warm again.) This afternoon, however, it’s hazing up rapidly and it’s hard to tell what the night sky will look like.
To a degree anyway, because the moon is going to be near-full and thus glaring out any meteors that are nearby – not the best of conditions even in the best of conditions. By all math, only about a week out of every month should be notably affected by the phase of the moon, given how long the phases last as well as the changing rise and set times, though far more than one out of four showers in the past couple of years has been affected by the moon, which likely indicates that they’re not randomly distributed throughout the year.
Anyway, I’m really hoping that the haze will continue throughout the night, illuminated by the moon and thus eradicating the chance of seeing 99% of the meteors that contact the atmosphere, of which I’m betting heavily there will be a ridiculously small number anyway. That would make me so happy.