Last nights meteor shower was I'm sure the best I will ever see in my lifetime. Certainly the best I've see to date. I woke up a 2 AM and got myself a lawnchair and layed down on it in the backyard and watched the show till about 3:20 am. There was plenty to watch! I figured about 10 to 15 per minute at my location in Apple Valley. Five of the meteors I saw had trails that lasted more than 5 minutes. These meteors with the long lasting trails seemed to enter another, lower level of the atmosphere. Each one initially flashed across the sky like the others but in the last part of thier path they increased thier glow intensly before burning out. One of these left a jet trail like path that over the course of 5 minutes or so became bent, probably from winds in the upper atmosphere. After laying in the cold in my sweats under a comforter from my room for more that an hour I finally decided to hit the sack. As I walked through my back yard, and just as I was about to pass under the roof of our patio I saw the biggest show of the evening. Above me over head and slightly to the east my gaze met a meteor that unlike the others was coming basically straight toward my direction, not a streak across the sky like the others. It was a point of light that grew brighter as it came and the bigger it grew the greener it became. As meteors go this took place over the course of a few seconds but it was by far the biggest one a saw all evening. As this big dog entered some level of the upper atmosphere it flared big time before it went out and to my amazement left a small roundish cloud where it had been. I watched this cloud for about 5 minutes reliveing in my mind what I had just seen and then I thought to my self that I should go into my garage and get my binoculars so I could get a closer look at this cloud left by this meteor. When I came back out from my garage the cloud was still there and I got a very clear close up veiw of it. It was like the puff of smoke left from those big loud fireworks that make just a big bang. As I watched it through my binoculars I could see this cloud drifting against the backdrop of the stars. There were no other clouds in the sky. This meteor being basically straight above me leaving this cloud as it did was not that far away, maybe 10 to 20 miles above me by my calculations :-) It was the highlight of the evening and caused me to stand out in the cold another 10 minutes thinking I might miss something that great in the next few minutes. Eventually the call of sleep compelled me to bed. It was an amazing show :-)
