Perseid Party Blows the Roof Off

Among the myriad highlights of a Bigadore summer few are more eagerly anticipated or highly cherished than a mid-August astronomical event: the annual Perseid meteor shower. Given that Cape Breton’s climate will never rival that of the Atacama Desert, the Perseid event is frequently and unhappily accompanied by a hand-maiden: Disappointment. Sometimes – more often than we like – August 12 delivers rain, or clouds, or a too-bright moon. Dark sky is essential, and Bigadore can be relied upon to deliver that, but the meteor show also demands a clear, cloudless, moonless, windless night. Which is exactly what we got for this year’s show.

When the circumstance are just right we – Bob, Lynn & Louise, Jan and your faithful correspondent – hump tarp, blankets and camp pads up to the cabin roof ‘round about 9:30 in the evening and wait for the show to begin. Conditions were so perfect this time that we stayed on the pitch for three hours, long enough to see the night sky make a good portion of its counter-clockwise circuit around Polaris, the north star.

We counted 115 meteors during the drama, close to 40 an hour. Many burn so quickly you’d better not blink or you’ll miss the flash. But there are always glories: a flaming arrow blazing across the dark leaving a trail that elicits gasps from all assembled. Just so you know, the three shining stars this time were meteors #40, 87 and 108.

What causes the Perseid show? Well, every year on or about August 12 our little old planet races through the flight path of a long-ago comet. The earth’s atmosphere collides with small – very small – particles of dust left in the comet’s wake. You could hold thousands of these particles in the palm of your hand, but never mind, when the collision occurs the tiny bits burn briefly, brightly and sometimes spectacularly for anyone astute enough to be gathered with pals on the roof of a dark-sky summer cabin.

I asked the others to speculate how many other Boularderie Island roofs might be the scene of a gathering just like the one we reveled in. The twins guessed ours might be the only one of its kind. Can it be so? It wasn’t just meteors performing for our wandering gaze. We watched the international space station – recently and famously the domicile of Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield – sail grandly past. And many other satellites too. During lulls in the meteor action we could contemplate the three stars of the ‘Summer Triangle’, one of which, Deneb, burns at a hard-to-imagine 300,000 times the power of our puny, ordinary little Sun.

Or we could look toward the constellation Cassiopeia and see with our very own dark-adapted eyes the smudge of light that is Andromeda. Astronomers have counted billions of galaxies in the cosmos. Among all the billions, Andromeda is our closest galactic neighbour. But how close is ‘close’? Consider this, by the time the light of the trillion stars of the next-door neighbour collides with your rods and cones, it has been on the march, traveling at the speed of light, for, oh, about 2.3 million years.

How grand a time was had by all? Over the moon would seriously understate the fun. So grand that a passerby could have seen me out again, in the wee-smalls last night, between 2 and 4, not just looking for Perseid stragglers, but trying to photograph them too. And wonder of wonders, I succeeded at it. Squint attentively enough at these images and you’ll see the telltale streak of a fragment of comet dust that may have flashed – who knows – for me and me alone in this darkened corner of Cape Breton. Makes a fella lucky as all hell.

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