The Lyrid Meteor Shower – Beautiful, or Invisible?
Monday, April 23, 2007 at 11:04AM Let me be clear from the outset. Despite its name, this post isn’t going to contain beautiful descriptions of the recent Lyrid meteor shower that took place on April 22-23, 2007. This post also won’t have fabulous photos of the meteors, although it does have a photo of the night-time skies. And, in an effort to be completely transparent and not mislead a single person, let me state with the utmost conviction that I doubt I even saw the Lyrid meteor shower. In all fairness, I did see one to two flashes of brilliance across the sky, but those were probably just random bits of space junk, and not the actual meteor shower.
With that in mind, perhaps this post should more appropriately be called, “Adventures in Attempting to See the Lyrid Meteor Shower” or even better, “A Saturday Night Not Spent on the Couch”. Recently, my wife, the Pink Princess and I, decided to expand our list of hobbies by taking up night photography. While it might sound spontaneous, it was really a predictable choice, as we were already avid photographers, backpackers, campers, hikers, and travelers. Since we had all the equipment, it was really just an extension of our existing photography addiction.
Our first foray into taking photos without light was a couple weeks ago when we were at the Grand Canyon. Things had gone reasonably well, considering we spent half of our time over-thinking how to set the aperture on the camera. The other half of our time was spent in alternating fashion complaining about the searing cold winds coming across the canyon late at night, and cursing about the abnormally bright desert moon. When we had returned home, we reviewed our pictures, and found them decent for a first effort, but definitely not worthy of being shown to anyone but our dog. We resolved to head back out to the wilderness to get some truly amazing pictures the next time there was no moon.
We looked at our calendar, and found that in three weeks time the moon would be absent. We circled it and vowed to go camping and get those super-duper fantastic photos. We had no idea that the Lyrid shower was even occurring that weekend. The week of our trip rolled around. We still hadn’t decided where to go. Since we were living in San Diego, we knew we were going to have to head out a distance to get away from the evil light pollution from San Angeles that was even worse then the moon. This wasn’t a challenge; the challenge was finding a spot we hadn’t already over-visited. Eventually, we decided that we were headed to Joshua Tree. The morning after this decision, I found out about the meteor shower. It seemed a provincial bonus – one ordained by the heavens. No moon, plenty of stars, and even meteors. We were going to win some sort of award. Maybe even the Pulitzer for our photos, if they gave them out. The photos were going to be that good.
The next day, Pink got sick. It wasn’t one of those dread diseases that would make me avoid her like a Typhoid Mary for a week, but rather one of those small malingering things that just made a person miserable. For once, I made the right decision, and did what any good husband would do. I called off the trip, to our mutual disappointment. I knew that somewhere, out there, at Joshua Tree, someone would be taking the best photos of our generation – stars, meteors, rocks, trees – and who knew – maybe even those mythical UFO’s that may or may not exist. I gritted my teeth, and reminded myself that even if we had been there, our photos might not have been that great, because I could have mis-set the timer, or left the lens cap on, or failed to charge the battery, or otherwise made some sort of easy mistake.
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