[The background above is part of an image by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Crescent Nebula.]

WHERE: At Fairfield School, Road 32, Davis.

The Club will Not hold a meeting in July. (sorry!)

Good Prospects for Meteor Viewing. The Moon will be in its "last quarter" phase and so interfere considerably with viewing on Sunday morning August 12th, when the maximum number of meteors are expected to streak across the morning sky. For most of the evening, we should be able to see as many as 60 or more Perseids streaking across the sky every hour. Be aware that you will need a very dark site for such a good view, however.

As usual, our party will be at Fairfield Elementary School at the intersection of Road 32 and Road 96. Take Russell Blvd (Road 32) west 4 miles beyond the Highway 113 over crossing until you come to Road 96. Watch for the school crossing sign; the school is on the right side corner. There is a big grassy area (for chairs and blankets) and an area of asphalt (for telescopes, etc). Avoid automatic sprinkler systems!

What to Do There? Maybe you will want to just lie on a blanket, soak up some starlight, leave with-out saving anything to anyone--it's OK!. Or maybe this occasion would be a great opportunity to stay up all night with a special friend watching for shooting stars. Or, you might be puzzled by what you see, ask an anony-mous question in the dark, and someone will attempt to supply a correct answer.

What to Bring? There are some items you‚ll want to bring with you to observe regardless of where you decide to observe. Binocu-lars are optional but fun. Warm clothes, some-thing relaxing to sit or lie on that will protect you from the heavy dew, mosqui-to or gnat repellent, a flash-light in a paper bag or with a red filter (to keep lights dim) are more important. A warm non-alcoholic drink can be helpful (alcohol will cause drowsiness and reduce visual acuity) If you are joining us at Fairfield School please remem-ber that the school's rest rooms are not available.

How to watch? Try to lay or sit so that you can see as much of the unobstructed sky as possible˜the direction you are facing is unimportant. The darker the sky, the more meteors you will see. You can expect to see a bright meteor approximately every 15 minutes from our site. Certainly Fairfield School is not what astronomers consider a "dark" site favored by amateur astronomers.

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Surprise Great June Meeting! The club enjoyed a great treat at its June meeting when member Ben Granett (DSH 200 graduate and current student at CalTech) presented a slide show on his recent work on the 60 inch telescope at Palomar. We saw the current situation at Palomar, a major research site in astronomy, as well has a "behind the scenes" look at the control rooms for the telescopes. Congratulations to Ben, who is doing work on exploding stars during the summer and we wish him much continued discovery and excitement in his work at CalTech. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm with us, Ben, and please come visit us again soon?

Stardust Memories of Our Club's Past Shower Parties. Every Shower Party is a little different from its predecessor. Each viewing combines "heavenly" and "earthly" elements into a new experience. 1998, was notable for its unremitting heat (well in the nineties around 7 o'clock) and by the flashing "caution" lights on a road grader that had been parked in the west field adjacent to the playground. No one who was there will ever forget the year a tractor in a neighboring field plowed on through the night, throwing up huge clouds of blinding dust; or the night Davis's newest shopping center opened to the northeast of our site filling the sky with gala shafts of light from searchlights. Then there was the memorable year we were attacked by gigantic flying bugs -- the infamous "Perseid Bug Shower." In 1997, we were "invaded" by a friendly army of TV news people from Sacramento (Channels 3, 10 and 31) interviewing attendees and broadcasting "Live at 10 and 11 p.m!" They kept the bright lights turned off as much as possible. We always have a lot of fun, even when there aren't many meteors visible.

Perhaps our most unusual party was held August 11, 1993. This shower was forecast to be one of the best nights for meteor showers in recent history. Arriving at 6:00 p.m., two hours before the scheduled meeting, I was the seventh car in the small parking lot. By 8:00 the parking lot was packed and parked cars extended for half a mile or more down all the roads leading to the school. The large grassy playing field became a solid patchwork of blankets. I suffered a recurrent feeling of near panic when I began to consider what might happen to me if these people decided the evening was not "fun." Fortunately the sky was gorgeous and we saw many meteors.

What is a Meteor Shower? Every year, around August 12, the Earth plows into an area of its orbit around the sun that lies close to the orbit of Comet Swift-Tuttle. The debris from this comet creates the Perseid Meteor shower, the most popular and most famous of all annual meteor showers. As we watch the late night sky in mid August, this debris ˜mostly particles the size of grains of sand--will be travel-ing 30 or 40 miles per second and vaporizing into incandes-cent streaks as they incinerate in Earth's protective blanket of air miles above us. This shower is notable for its constancy and for the rapid movements of the meteors as they streak through the sky. Approximately 45 percent of the meteors leave "trains" or smoke-like trails that persist for a few seconds.

Why Perseid? The Perseid meteor shower gets its name from the location of the radiant of the shower in the constellation Perseus. The radiant is an optical illusion, appearing to be the point in the sky from which the meteors originate. The Comet debris that enters our atmosphere is travelling in parallel paths around the sun, but from our perspective, it seems the meteors are "radiating" from one spot in the sky to all other areas of the sky. The phenomenon is somewhat similar to standing between a pair of railroad tracks and looking them appear to converge to one point on the horizon. The tracks, like the paths of the comet dust, appear to radiate in two directions toward you, but in fact the lines are parallel.

How was the nature of "Meteor Showers" discovered? That meteor showers were the result of comets was surmised, though not proven, by an American, Edward Claudius Herrick in 1838, who investigated historical accounts of meteor displays and actually documented the history of the Perseid shower as a periodic event. However, this Connecticut amateur ultimately had to concede that 2 other investigators had discovered the annual nature of the Perseid shower independently (and earlier) in Brussels, Belgium and Cincinnati, Ohio. Herrick‚s evidence was more complete and compelling, however. In Herrick‚s time, most scientists argued that meteors in general were phenomena of Earth's atmospheric weather˜and were not originating in outer space. In fact, the word "meteor" refers to weather-based phenomena. Not until the 1860s did the famous astronomer, G. V. Schiaparelli show the connection between the appearance of Comet Swift-Tuttle (which orbits the sun every 120 years, approximately) and the increase in the number of meteors during the Perseid meteor shower. This comet-meteor connection helped prove that meteors were astronomical.

Neil Bone's 1993 book titled simply Meteors is a good introduction to observing, as is Gary W. Kronk's earlier Descriptive Catalogue. The best review of current viewing prospects is the "Celestial Calendar" section of the August 2001 Sky and Telescope magazine by the venerable Roger W. Signet. There you will find information how to watch meteors and the history of the discovery of the Perseids as well as information on the most recent predictions on the arrival of the Perseid meteors in 2001.

Need a Sky Map? Maps of the August Sky are available free on the Internet at http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html