Awesome Astronomy - The Eclipse & the Perseids

Setting up the telescope

0:00It's the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in 3, 2, 1.

0:30So, you might detect that I'm outside. A couple of hours to go to a very special astronomy double event, and I'm here under, frankly, clear blue skies, setting up my equipment and settling in for the night. It promised to be, hopefully, pretty spectacular. I'm, of course, talking about the deep solar eclipse, followed by the peak of the Perseids. Now, as I go back into the shed, you lucky people, you have just me for this episode, I'm afraid, because her of the dust, she of Dr. Dust,

1:01she is doing something else with this eclipse, fancy pants, which I'm sure she'll tell us all about when she is back from her adventure in the next episode. So, hello, and welcome to episode 180 of Awesome Astronomy for August 2026, and, specifically, August 12th, 2026, and the solar eclipse and the Perseid peak.

1:32Right then, so, how the devil are you? Well, it's just me talking to myself, really. So, well, I'm getting my equipment out right now, so, excuse the old bang and groan, patron, and what am I doing? Well, let's have a look. So, I am just in my grand astronomy shed, and I am just getting out. There's a groan. I'm getting any younger. I'm getting out various bits of equipment to view this eclipse. So, we're a little while away to go, and there is literally not a cloud in the sky.

2:05I could not hope for better weather, but I am just getting out. So, I'm getting out a dob, a six-inch dob that's got white light on the front of it. That's going to be good. I'm getting out hydrogen alpha in a moment when I've got a shelf and get that on a tripod.

2:23I'm going to set up... I've got some hydrogen alpha binoculars, got some goggles, of course. I might do another white light. I've got a couple of people might pop in, neighbours and things like that.

2:37Sort of pop in through the night, and I'm going to get the big dob out, of course, because we're going to wear the purses later. Also, the planets later on. We've got a bit of a planetary parade later. So, that's that. I'm going to sit and... Oh, there's a tripod.

2:54Out. And I'm going to do some sketching. Take some pictures as well, of course. Take some nice pictures, but everyone does pictures. So, I'm going to do some sketching. I'll talk about that, like exactly what I'm doing with that later on. So, at the moment, I'm going to bid you farewell. See you later. I'm going to put you down, and I'm going to get on with my setting up.

Solar sketching plan

3:15Otherwise, I'm never going to get set up if I keep talking to you lot. OK, so I'm all set up, and I am sitting here, what are we, 45 minutes before the eclipse, and I've just done some preliminary sketching. And so, my plan is to do a sketch about every 15 minutes.

3:39It's all quite simple, because it's just the position relative to the sunspot. And on the hydrogen alpha, the flares that you can see around the site is a really lovely prominence. It's a big, leaning tree. It's fantastic on the limb. And it's nice, nicely positioned sunspots. Nothing too spectacular and really big, like we had a couple of weeks ago. Big boy, then. But we've got some nice, nice line of sunspots across the sun, which will be nice to sort of position where the moon's limb is coming across.

4:12So, I've got 10 circles pre-done. I've done a sort of early sketch as the first one, the sort of pre-eclipse sketch, just tidying up. And then what I've done is I've got a bit of tracing paper, and I've traced the sunspots. So, I'm just going to put that over there. I've just traced the sunspot. So, what I can do is, of course, as the sun moves and rotates and everything, the sunspots will move position slightly in the eyepiece.

4:45So, I can, as I go down each circle, each sketch, I can just accurately position compared to the last sketch, which is by dabbing a couple of dots onto there and then drawing them. So, I'm having to redraw the sun every single time, and then I can just position the moon relative to that. And so, just keep track of it. And that's a sort of fun way of doing it. And that's it. I'll take a few images. I've got a Celestron phone holder, which I haven't got out, actually. I just realised, as I said that.

5:15I'll just come back into my... There she is.

5:21There we go. I'm going to fit that on as well, so I can take a few phone images. Just, you know me, I'm not a big image, and I like to have a few photos. And that'll be ready there. So, that'll be fun. And so, I'm just sitting here, just listening to the birds and the crickets and looking at the desert of my garden, because it hasn't rained here for about two months now. So, it's all looking a bit yellow. But it's absolutely glorious, owning from a story. But you cannot ask for a better moment to have this eclipse.

5:53It's absolutely superb. So, I will catch up with you in a bit, and we'll have a little chat about some of the astronomy news that I've noticed over the last little while while I'm sketching and talk about things that have caught my eye. I'll see you later.

First contact of the eclipse

6:09Okay, so we have first contact, and the moon has just moved in. And it's amazing how quickly it moves. And what I love is how you can see on the limb of the moon, it's not smooth. That's what I always love in an eclipse. That's something I forgot in the last episode when we were talking about eclipses, actually, was how you can see the kind of undulating surface, the sort of mountains, crater features,

6:41actually just on the limb, where the kind of the shadow is not smooth. You know, it's a really lovely bumpy thing. Yeah, it's moving at really quite a pace. It's always amazing how quickly it moves. But, yeah, we are on. Love it. Love it. Love it. And do you know what? The annoying thing is I've just spotted another little sunspot. And I've got to add to my diagram, which I hadn't spotted before.

7:11It's only tiny. It's just been sort of highlighted because it's actually very near the limb of the moon right now. So I better just adjust that. I'm going to make a little adjustment on my diagram. Right. So, here we go.

Radio circles and distant galaxies

7:41The eclipse is on. So, right, what we, uh, over a third of the way across. There's the moon eating up the sun. And it is noticeably dimmer. It is, you can sort of notice that the light's got loads dimmer than it should be for this time of day. Um, but, uh, where were we? Do you know what? It was, it was, uh, a story I saw the other day that I thought was really interesting we've not talked about. It was on radio circles, orcs. Um, I thought this was really interesting because it's, um, this,

8:12they were only discovered about six years ago. Um, and they're these vast sort of faint ring-shaped clouds of sort of highly energetic magnetized plasma that seems to surround distant galaxies, which is sort of fascinating itself straight away. Um, and they, they only emit light in radio wavelengths. So you need a really big radio telescope to, uh, to see them. Jodrell bank. Jodrell bank. Um, and they're massive. They, I mean, these things are like 10, 20 times the diameter of the Milky Way, these huge sort of radio rings.

8:42And so what's interesting that, uh, sort of end of last year, um, a, uh, one was discovered that's got the, the crazy name of RADG, no, sorry, G, J, J131346.9 plus 500320. Snappy title. And it's a sort of redshift of 0.94, which means we're seeing it sort of roughly, uh, half, sort of about 5 billion years ago, about half the sort of age of the universe thereabouts, a bit more than 5,

9:13sort of 6 billion years or so. Um, and it's nearly a million light years across. And then what's really, really fascinating about it is there's a double ring. And this, this sort of challenges the, the kind of standing theory on this org. That's why it's really interesting because it was thought that these were, um, kind of shockwaves triggered by sort of supermassive hole mergers and things like that. Um, and actually this might now, because this thing's so big and there's two rings, I think it might be driven by sort of massive superwinds, these sort of powerful streams

9:44of sort of charged particles being expelled from the host galaxy. Um, but we, we still don't know. It's just really, really fascinating kind of massive objects. When you think about it, a sort of ring of, of this little plasma, you can only see in radio, that's, that's 10, 20 times a diameter in the Milky Way. That's just really vast. Um, and it was found by citizen scientists. That's, that's what I find really particularly interesting. Um, it was, uh, a project called RAD at Home. Um, it's an astronomy collaboration using data from the European LOFAR radio telescope.

10:15Um, and so it, it's a great demonstration of how, you know, humans, you know, not spotted by AI and things like that. This was spotted by humans going through the data. And so it's sort of really good demonstration of how, um, you know, humans can still outperform. We can still do better than the AI. So, uh, back to the telescope. Uh, where are we? I've got to move the telescope. The Earth's rotated, bloody thing. I wish the planet wouldn't do that. Um, so where are we? Yeah, we're almost, I mean, the moon's about getting on for halfway across now.

10:45Yeah, of course, of course, that's not quite half the sun covered. Uh, but it's really looking like a sort of crescent moon in the, uh, and it's been slowly swallowing up the sunspots, I've been noting. Um, so where are we? It's, I'm almost a few minutes away from doing my next sketch because we're, we're almost there. Looks fabulous in the hydrogen alpha as well. Uh, and, uh, yeah, looks really good. So, uh, I'll come back in a bit with, uh, more, more eclipse and, uh, more, uh,

11:15more astronomy stories.

11:19Say hello. Hello. Hello.

Maximum eclipse and eerie light

11:22Right, I've been joined by a crowd now. And we're almost at maximum coverage. Uh, the sun is just to see that and it's got noticeably dimmer, hasn't it? It's like, like, evening. It feels like sunset, doesn't it? And we're, what are we? Absolutely. It does. We're five minutes from maximum coverage. It's going to get even dimmer. Um. It's a weird kind of dim, though. It's a really weird dim, isn't it? Because, yeah. Because the sun's still really high up in the sky.

11:49It's very different to the last time, I don't know, isn't it? Yeah. It was cloudy. Yeah. The last time. It was very different. It was a different time of the day when it was happening as well, which makes it feel different. We had a solar eclipse back in there. We did. About 14,000. Something like that. It was during the... Yeah, it was less than the... Yeah. It was like early... I remember seeing it on the school run, walking back and going ill. Yeah, they mentioned it in school. I think we do four in school. Yeah. They mentioned it in school. I think I've got some very blurry photographs. Yes, we had one.

12:20When was it? You put the kids in the car and drove. Yes, we did. I remember that. I was working. We went like three quarters of the way to Wales. We did. It's true. And then met with people in a labouring. Yeah. The half of them were like dad's friends in the country in the last row camp because the other one were just other random people. It's true. It's true. That last sunspot group is just about to go. Is it? Oh, you can see it. If you need to aim that, just use that there. Look, that's the sun there and just wiggle it around.

12:53Use the handle at the top. Yeah. So how much smaller is that little slither going to? It's going to get a little bit smaller. We've got... Where are we? 713. Yeah. Because you can see the side on the bottom sort of slow... We've got four minutes. It's smaller. Four minutes and we're almost there.

13:12Um... Yeah, it's getting... Very good. And then we see it move across. We do. And it's... It's that really eerie light you get in eclipses. It's really great. It's such a... We'll just try and get out and put it in the seat. Always there. Where are we? We are... Two minutes.

13:39We'll get you put another photo on the... Two minutes. Not yet. Right.

13:47I'll just have a quick look in the scope, by all means. But...

13:54It's pretty much gone. It's such a small sliver now. And my... Is the colour of it sort of changing? Or is that just my imagination? It's for sure. That prominence in the Hydra and Alpha the prominence is just sticking right at one side of the moon now. It's really cool. We've got those... It's like the moon's erupting. And yeah, the sky's got that really weird colour you get with an eclipse. Yeah. That sort of orange-blue. It's all sort of grey-blue and it's really... Very cool.

14:28And it's gone very quiet. Have you noticed all the... Yeah, the birds have gone... The birds have gone... Hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. This is a bit early.

14:35Yeah, all the birds have stopped singing. Yep.

14:39There we go. We're one minute.

14:50I think it's when the birds stop. That is the real... For the dog's bark. Some dogs are a bit gooey. Someone's doing a study of impact on... Let's see. It's passed.

15:04On the other side. Yeah, it's gloomy. You can see it's starting to... Yeah. There we go. Yeah, we've got that off. Yeah, there's now more on the right than there is on the left. Yeah. There we go. That's maximum.

15:18There we go. Yep, that's it. There's our maximum. Wow, look at that. That is a tiny slither, isn't it? Yeah. A little upside-down smile. Mm-hmm. So, where's it gone?

15:32Are you using the telescope or are you just really stuck in with your eyes to go home? Oh, I've screwed up. Oh, we're done.

15:42Oh, no. I've unscrewed it up. Sorry. I've just... You've unscrewed the telescope? I think that's bad. I've fixed it. I've just screwed up this telescope. Oh, I know why. Because it's literally gone into shadow. The shadow. It's through the shade. Literally, the sun has just dipped down. Ugh. Way, way, way. But do you? Um.

16:04Shade. I can see it with my eye, though. What? Oh, yeah.

16:16Oh, I've lost it completely. Look at that. That was good. Good girl. Good girl. Good girl. Good girl. Yeah, it's starting to pop around the other side now, isn't it? There we go. Look at that. That was amazing. That was awesome. That was awesome.

16:34Well, there we are. That was... I had a whole gang of neighbours and friends just pop over to have a look and see the maximum. And it was really weird. It was really eerie. It was... We've got that proper grey-orange sky and everything went so the bird stops and then actually one of the night-time birds we had a little night gel twittering away. It was just fantastic. So it was sort of... And then it's got brighter again. It's actually brighter now as we're almost finished. The various sunspots

17:05are starting to reappear and we're about... Oh, about an eighth the moon. Even the moon. Eighth the sun. Still covered. And, yeah, the birds are singing again and it's noisier and the sky is bluer and, yeah, it was really weird. That's exactly what we were talking about. That's almost double evening. It was really weird to see how the birds reacted to it. Yeah, so that's grand. Well, it's just coming to an end and then it's on to the Perseids later on.

17:35So a little bit of a break. A bit of food. And I will talk about some more astronomy events in a minute. I've got carried away with lots of people here suddenly in... Which is always fun to share astronomy and have people over and see it. So that was good. So I shall just enjoy these last few moments and then I will speak to you a lot later when it's a lot darker and there are other stars out.

Curiosity rover mud cracks on Mars

18:14Okay, so it's a bit later on now and the solar stuff is packed away and actually I did get the big scope out and I thought, do you know what? I'm just going to sit and watch the meteors. I'm just going to watch the Perseids. I'm just going to kick back and watch that. Yeah, so it's getting dark. I've already seen one really bright one which had to be pretty bright because it wasn't completely dark yet. So just sitting here chilling, reflecting on what was a spectacular solar eclipse and that was amazing.

18:44Just that... I've seen a few. I mean, that's the best since 1999 and that... just how you're never ready for just how cool it is going to be. Just how incredible it's going to be and just the eeriness of how quiet it got and the light change and just... It was just so beautiful. So beautiful. It was really stunning. So that was great. And I sort of watched it through to the end and saw the last contact

19:17as it left the limb. It was just really impressive. Just really beautiful. So, yeah, that was spectacular. So hopefully this evening is going to be good. So while I was sitting here I was just thinking about things that news, more astronomy news. So a really cool one is Curiosity. Good old Curiosity. I haven't thought about Curiosity for ages. And so that is... It's discovered a sort of honeycomb landscape which is really cool. So it was climbed through

19:48a valley called Valley Grande and it's seen this sort of sea of little polygon-shaped fractures going across the landscape. And it does, for all the world, look sort of like dried mud. How you sort of see mud in a dried up river and things like that. And so it was seen in late June. It's sort of been analysed and they were sort of publishing the images just recently, just last week, I think.

20:18And there's sort of geometric sort of honeycomb. Each polygon's out. It's kind of four to eight centimetres across. That's sort of one and a half, three inches.

20:31And they... Well, they've seen these before. This is just a huge kind of field of them. Massive, massive field of them. Which stretches, you know, kind of as far as the camera can see. And so...

20:47What are they? Well, it is probably what it looks like, which is probably from drying out mud through sort of cooling and being wet and evaporating. And so this is that kind of extra bit of the puzzle, isn't it? And that sort of, you know, that watery pass to Mars. And just, it is incredible that you think, you know, this rover's been doing this for 14 years now. And it's just constantly just feeding us

21:17all that information about kind of, you know, the surface of Mars and what it's like and this sort of watery past. And here's this just really incredible, you know, it's something that was some sort of lake or estuary or something that's dried up and there it is. And it's pretty much only what it could be, really. It's really fascinating.

21:39And what's other things I saw before again? Kick back with the meteors.

21:46So, how about the, that was the, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument,

Mapping the universe with DESI

21:55the DESI, so the Legacy Imaging Surveys team. And it's published a map, get this, it's a 5.6 trillion pixel map of the universe.

22:07Which is incredible. It's, it's, this sort of two-dimensional colour map. And it contains 5.6 trillion pixels and features nearly, again, it's 4 billion distinct celestial objects. And that's, mind-boggling.

22:23Stars and galaxies mainly, but it, it covers three quarters of the entire sky. And it's taken about 13 years to put it together. And combines more than, how was it? I was trying to commit this all to memory and I made a few notes and I couldn't remember. Something like, it's over 250, it might have been over 260,000 exposures in sort of near-infrared, which I think is incredible, really.

22:54so, just, just, incredible sort of what over time with a good task. I mean, I think this is not ultra-modern, this isn't sort of, you know, AI and things, sort of, you know, Vera Rubin or something, this is something that's been running for 13 years and it's put together just the most incredible picture and if you look up some of the images from it, they just are incredible. Just so many pixels, just incredible. and I think

Keeping Voyager 2 alive

23:24the last one

Keeping Voyager 2 alive

23:25was Voyager 2, we often talk about Voyager 1, but good old Voyager 2 is going, and they've started a program, Big Bang, they've called it, and they're just trying to keep it going for at least another year was the story and that they're slowly turning, you know, sort of, it's losing about four watts of power a year as its power runs down and so they've shut down in a sequence as many things they can get away with in order

23:55to keep three instruments that can just keep collecting this kind of interstellar data for at least another year and they think they've been successful, so Voyager 2 still with us for another year and hopefully still creating the data. So there's some stories that I've been kind of catching my eye while I've been getting ready for this fabulous eclipse we just had and for the Perseid, so I've already seen one really good Perseid while I was just sorting things out, so I'm going to go and kick back and I'll have a chat with you later when it really

24:25starts after midnight.

Watching the Perseid meteor shower

24:28Well, so far, we've been out here for about 15 minutes and I've seen well, that's the tenth one, Starlink, going over in a row. So I've seen ten Starlinks but I haven't seen another Perseid yet. what's vowel activity?

24:59Oh, there's another Starlink.

25:08Bloody Leighton.

25:17But it's a really beautiful evening, very quiet,

25:22very warm, I'm still sitting here in a t-shirt, it's almost midnight, but so far the Perseids haven't really come to the party. No, nothing at the moment.

25:47That one big bright one, I don't know what, ages ago now.

26:00More owls had Sir Horny, and we've had some barn owls as well, screeching away.

26:17There's a deer crashing through the woods as well.

26:20There's still no Perseids.

26:24I'll keep looking, I'll report back in a minute. Okay, well, so far the satellite meteor count is a factor of 10, and there's been five Perseids so far, I've seen. Some very fast ones, very nice ones, long trails, and about 50 satellites so far, I think mostly Starlink, so they'll seem to be following the same line in various paths.

26:54Oh, there's another one.

26:57Oh, fantastic meteor, just went through Cassiopeia, big, long, lasting trail, that was beautiful, little sparks coming off, absolutely stunning. Okay, so six, six to 52 satellites.

27:14Oh, lovely trail, look at that, there we go, it's picking up now, there's another one, so we're up to about the seventh, really good, long trail, that one. Yeah, there you go. Oh, oh my goodness me, that was absolutely stunning.

27:31Actually glowing, you could actually see a little white, reddish hot, it was really cool. Big, long, sparkling trail behind it, that was stunning coming out of Cassiopeia.

27:42So we're picking up, we are picking up.

27:53Now nothing.

27:56As of the meteors you get two or three and then nothing.

28:02But that was a really, oh, another one, just a little one, that was good.

28:09Our previous one was absolutely stunning. Oh, another one, there we go, almost in the same spot as the last one.

28:18Somebody's sort of projecting through and just out of Cassiopeia actually, seems to be the prime spot at the moment.

28:26Of course, the radiant is just below in Perseus, it's not far from the double cluster actually.

28:34They are spectacular.

28:46Bit of tawny owl action.

28:52and another starlink.

28:58But it's a really beautiful evening as well, it's a lovely evening as well, you can see the Milky Way overhead, because of course we've got a nice new moon, and it's completely clear, and actually the seeing and transparency is not too bad this evening, it's actually brilliant, it's been pretty poor, the irony of we've had all this clear hot weather over the UK for, well over most of Europe for weeks and weeks now, but the irony being that actually the seeing and transparency has been pretty

29:29poor. did have a very, very good night of astronomy last week actually where the seeing and transparency was actually excellent, it was really good, and had a long late night travelling around the Summer Triangle picking up various objects in the dob, and that was a very enjoyable evening, and it was one of those where you could really ramp up the magnification,

30:00which is quite rare in the UK to be able to really ramp up magnification, so you were able to get the dob, the 12-inch up to, it was using a 7mm, I think it even used a 5mm high piece at one point, it was looking, got the ring nebula nice and big, and really, really stunning views, a beautiful evening, and it's not quite as clear this evening, you can see the transformation is not quite as good, I think it's probably sort of good to average, but it is a really beautiful evening for sitting back and looking at Starving

30:31Satellites, another one, and just enjoying the sky, it's really beautiful, and punctuated by some really stunning meteors, and having only for a little while now, which is why I'm wittering, let's see what happens, let's play that game, is there another one? Right, turn off for a second, one of the things, I can't get a drink, miss an hourburst, come out and think, oh, there's no meteor, no,

31:04no more for a moment, I shall report back in a bit, so, I've seen a few more, tons, but some really nice ones, so,

Swift-Tuttle and meteor history

31:20Perseus, well, the Perseus, I suppose, we're sitting here waiting some more, well, of course, the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle, and Swift-Tuttle was last with us in 1995, that was the last time it's passed, so, it has various sort of trails, because of course, each time a comet comes in, it follows a slightly different path than before, so, it's one of the reasons that probably the Perseus is quite broad,

31:51long shower, but concentrated around now, first observed, probably, we think about 36, common era, so it's been, so a shower has been observed for a long time, although, it wasn't actually, it was kind of known, perhaps, sort of, regular, it certainly sort of appears in various folk legends and things like that, but actually, it was not until, the 1830s,

32:24that a Belgian astronomer, Adolfi Quetelet, he was the one that said that he kind of observed, you know, I think this is, I think he says something like, I think I notice a greater frequency of these meteors between the 10th and 15th of August, this is a thing that seems to happen every year, well, that was a really bright, it was like the shortest meteor, but extremely

32:55bright flash, look at that, right over at Zenith, that was really impressive, incredibly bright, but very short,

33:04and so he's, kind of, he then went back through his historical record, and he predicted that yes, this is what's happening, and this is the sort of regular shower, and his peak is somewhere around August the 10th, August the 12th, that was his prediction, so it's kind of his shower, really, but it is

33:35the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle, won't be Swift-Tuttle, of course, won't be back until now, its orbital period is a Halley-type comet, and its, I believe, its orbital period is, it's over 100, I think it's about 130, I'm going to say 135,

34:01but it might be slightly less than that, and I'd have to go and look it up, I can't remember off the top of my head, probably people shouting, it's 132, it was 133, but it's something like that, it's around there, and it's not due back, next, next period you've done, so the last period was actually 1992, it's the last scene in 1995, the last time we sort of observed it with a telescope, like you can see it

34:31for us, and then it won't be back until the 2120s, I think it's actually 100 years this year, actually, I think, it's 2126, is the next time the day will be past,

34:47and I have replenishing the stream, so that's the Perseids, now actually, yeah, having said, it's a beautiful clear light, there is a very, very thin cloud, very clear, very thin, very broken cloud bank that's just passing through, and it's very clear over there, very clear over there, so I think, oh, there was a little meteor, I think I'm going to take a quick break for a drink while this cloud bank just passes and come back out and hopefully Perseids are

35:17going to get their act together and start filling the sky with spectacularness.

35:24Ta-ta.

35:28Ah, see, that's the luck of the tea. I've come out with a nice mug of tea and a jumper, because it actually has started to get just a little bit cool, and as soon as I walk out and sit down, the most spectacularly bright meteor just went through some Asia. Absolutely stunning, it was really long, really stunningly bright. So hopefully that's a good sign.

35:53I've got to get my eyes used to the dark again now.

36:00Normally if I'm with a telescope I have to pop in for a drink, I always keep an eye shut and pull my hat over my eye or something, but I didn't today, I just popped in and made a cup of tea.

36:15Yeah, that was a good one, but no, no more.

36:19Come on, Perseids, give me an outburst.

36:24You're going to do it, are you?

36:31But a really beautiful evening, we've got a really lovely clear Milky Way overhead, going through Zenith now, and going through Cassiopeia, we've got Capella,

36:44just to the sort of north-north-east, looking like a disco ball, sort of about not quite 20 degrees above the horizon,

36:56the sort of thing I notice in the summer sky, that sort of Capella dancing away in the north, and then work out from that, got Perseus just there, and then Cassiopeia, and you see the Milky Way going streaking overhead, going over there's Deneb, and Cygnus,

37:18just up there, and there you get,

37:23and the square of Pegasus is just definitely up in the east now, getting quite high, which means Saturn should be just, it's probably just behind that tree, on the east side of my garden, oh no, no, no, I think that's it there, Saturn, I can see Saturn, it's just there, which is nice, popping up, still quite low though, but Saturn is back,

37:53and over there, there's some major,

37:56there's an Arcturus, over there in the west, nice and bright, really beautiful sky, but, no bloody meteor, so that bright one on the walk down, where's the next one, come on, get into prime time now, no,

38:22not going to do it, well, I shall drink my tea, and I'll report back again, in a bit, hopefully, after a massive outburst. of course, as soon as I pressed stop on the record, there was one that passed straight through Cassiopeia, but I didn't want to just report, I'd just seen an erratic, it was one going in completely the opposite direction, definitely not a Perseid, and it was kind of, everything about it was wrong,

38:52it was slower, and I think Perseid's about 56 kilometres a second, that was clearly a lot slower, completely in the direction, that would have, I can trace it back, it would have gone through, oh, it was Arcturus actually, so, yeah, it was even, it was an erratic, there we go, but, it's still not really any great action yet, less satellite activity, I think, because the sun's got a bit lower in the northern

39:22sky, we're not getting quite as many satellites reflected now, actually, it was noticeable, there's no sort of drop-off, there's one, following the same path, there's another side, you can see a line of starlings, actually, three of them in a row, following the same line,

39:45but, there has been a noticeable drop in the number of visible satellites now, actually, as we get a bit darker, we're into true darkness, as soon as the sun gets a bit lower,

39:57but, still not really great hill-seed activity, come on, look, we've got a new moon, this is the perfect time, guys, do your thing, here we go

Midnight meteor activity picks up

40:13now, after seeing yet another erratic in a completely different direction, it seems to have picked up now, we're past midnight, and, yeah, we're getting some serious activity now,

40:29some great long run through, some ages then, another one through Cassiopeia, lots of little small ones now, you can see, it's got properly dark, and my eyes have gone up to you, so I can see some of the little ones, little faint ones, which, of course, is the advantage of a new moon, with the eclipse, of course, oh, there's another one, yeah, look at that, oh, superb, there we go, nice, oh, another little one there, yeah, the activity's picking up

41:00now after midnight, oh, another one, yeah, just dropped down through Pegasus, so, here we go, so, hopefully, this is the beginning of good times, um, oh, that's beautiful, oh, two, look at that, god,

41:24one caught my eye, and then there was a bigger one that followed in the same area, and that was nice, just down,

41:31um, where's that, and where, just, well, actually, just, just to the left of Perseus, actually, um, and, yeah, looking good, here we go, it's home,

41:56aeroplane going into Bristol Airport, it's late,

42:02um, no US bombers today, we, uh, the, uh, big thing we've had flying over us for the last few weeks is, um, B1s and B52s are coming out of RAF Fairford, oh, there's another meteor, and we always know when, uh,

42:22oh, oh, super one straight over the ZF, oh, and another one, oh, super, just by Vega, um, yeah, oh, we always know when there's a, there's a threat to bomb, um, Iran, because suddenly all these bombers take off, and then they usually return about four hours later when they'd back down, um, no bombers today, it would have been nice, and,

42:53uh, yeah, that was looking good, not, oh, there's another little one there, another one there, and that one that went to Madseneth just now, that was a really long string, that, that went from, oh, easily from, um, where are we looking, uh, that was Ursa Minor right over towards, there you go that was, that was a, that was a really long trail, oh,

43:32another little one there, just in Cassiopeia, yeah, the activity's definitely picked up, not an outburst yet, but, we're getting, getting some good activity, which is good, I shall report back in a bit,

44:01well, it's, uh, it's well past 1am now, um, and, I can't say it's been a vintage Perseids, it's, um, it's not been disappointing in the, oh, the couple just went over just now, um, it's not been spectacular, I've seen far more impressive Perseids, and seen outbursts, and things like that, but it's, it's, it's been reasonable,

44:31we've seen a few, um, I think counts probably about, um, probably near 50, um, I've been keeping a completely accurate count, there's probably been seen about 50, um, there's been some pretty good ones, some pretty bright trails, some pretty long ones, um, some very bright ones actually, um, but it's never, it's not, never, um,

44:59never really broken any records, certainly, in terms of numbers, um, certainly more satellites, more starlings this evening, um, but any time sitting under the sky is never wasted, oh, another one there, that's nice, um, so, I'm going to sign off now, I'm going to spend a little bit more time looking at the sky and, uh, focusing a couple more before turning in, um, so, goodbye from Sidonia Base.

Signing off from Cydonia Base

45:31Awesome Astronomy is produced by Ralph, Paul, Jen, John, Damien, and Dustin, and is free to use with attribution. Theme music by Star Soulsman with Stinger Variation by Ryn Jorgensen. We promote general science, astronomy, space exploration, and rational thinking with more resources on our website at awesomeastronomy.com. If you want us to read your thoughts and comments out on the show, send us your views,

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