I began my viewing at 11 PM on Saturday night. My first task was to find a suitable viewing location. After discovering that my house was surrounded on 2 sides with lights and the other two with trees, I decided my best bet was to go on the roof. After having a quick chuckle at the mosquito's fruitless attempts to leech a little nutrition from me I went to find a place to lay down. I almost fell over as a fairly bright meteor passed over head and I swung my head up to look. I saw nearly 20 overall. They seemed to appear more often directly over me then anywhere else but I assume that this was because I was looking straight up. At almost any time I could see 3 airplanes overhead , which is quite distracting. I was not at all disappointed with the sight though. I saw one in particular that came from north to south and was incredibly bright. The brighter ones had a reddish orange glow to them, however the dimmer ones appeared more white. As my clever ploy of wearing jeans and a long sleeved sweater began to backfire and I began to get uncomfortably warm. I saw decidedly less meteors during this time most likely because I was distracted. About 10 minutes to midnight I began to realize that the moon was also impairing my view. After several minutes of seeing nothing but a large cloud a few planes passing through it and a bright moon I decided to call it quits. I then of course came in to write this report (or whatever you want to call it). I noticed that one star that was nearly straight up was very bright and appeared to flicker. It was definitly the brightest star in the sky.
Total Time: 1 Hour
Meteors Observed: around 20
Other Objects Observed: 1 moon, lots of stars, and one car with annoyingly bright headlights
UFOs Seen: 0... or so I believe
Mosquitoes: Lots
Mosquitoe bites: 0
The sheer size of this nebula is amazing. If it were the distance from earth of say the Orion Nebula, it woulf take up a whopping 60 degrees of sky! Yet because it is 180,000 light years away it appears to be star sized and it was originally classified as a star. It's truly beautiful and spindly appearance earned it it's name, however it is slightly larger then your average spider, spanning 1,000 light years across.
