Me, June, and a Meteor Shower

Hello. I'm Gregg Pasterick, your new Contributing Editor (CE) here, at Amateur Astronomy. Perhaps a few of you recognize me from Wildflowers of North America, where I contribute weekly articles, and you are wondering, "What the heck is he doin' over here, under the stars?" That's simple; long before I traveled around chasing the wild flowers, I was a star gazer. In fact, I majored in astronomy in college, many astronomical discoveries ago.

During those years at Ohio State I discovered, among all those equations and Greek alphabet, the beauty of the stars wasn't bound by mere theory and equation, but often soared on thermals rising up through the imagination, sailed the ocean swells of dreams and plumbed the depths of our spirit. Just as there is nothing like a patch of Calypso Orchids among the Redwoods, there is nothing in nature like a starry night; the Milky Way cascading across the sky like a waterfall, meteors suddenly streaking through the familiar starry patterns, the planets shimmering like polished jewels. And it provides us a marriage of mind and spirit.

I hope to share here, in my monthly articles, that wondrous feeling. I hope to inspire an appreciation for the night sky; a place to ponder the cosmos, whether with equations and observations, or dreamy eyes and a rhyming couplet. No matter how you view the stars, I'll be driving the car, pointing out the sights.

Over the years I've watched occultations and conjunctions and eclipses and so on, but meteor showers, they were what inflated my tires.

I was an active meteor shower observer for years and years, focusing mostly on the Perseids because, let's face it, an August night is much less uncomfortable than one in December. In the Northern Hemisphere, anyway. I was so dedicated, and gathered so much observational data, I was referred to as the premiere Perseid observer in the U.S. by Meteor News. That was during the mid-1990's. Since then, particularly after the Leonid downpour of 2001, I've gotten more sleep, leaving the meteors to folks a little bit younger and a lot more energetic.

Given all that, I'll say the June was always a "down time" month for me. After a spring of wildflowers, warbler migration, hunting morel mushrooms and getting yet another garden up and growing, I took a break. My annual Perseid watch always began the first clear, moonless night in July, and lasted until the third week of August. So, sandwiched in between a busy spring and about 7 weeks of sleepless nights, I took it easy. That included very little real astronomy.

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