Ad Astra Observatory

I arrived at the dark skies of Clearwater, WA in a heatwave yesterday. It was in the high (!) 90s all the way through Oregon and into WA.

The skies were nice and clear, with lots of texture in the Milky Way. My wife, her brother, and I spent some time looking at the stars and saw a few shooting stars. They came from the general direction of Perseus, but I would have thought we were past the shower, so they could have been randoms.

Anyway, I saw a phenomenon that I hadn’t seen before; some of the particularly bright meteors left glowing streaks behind them that continued to glow for a second or two after the meteor burned out. It was very cool.

There is a very dark patch near the North America Nebula and Deneb. It was noticeably darker than the rest of The Dark Rift.

Too bad I didn’t bring a telescope, but a nice night.