Reporter's Notebook | Meteor shower: Blink and you'll miss it

When I was 6 years old, my dad woke me early one November morning to see something special. We sat at my bedroom window and watched a spectacular Leonid meteor shower in the autumn night sky above Washington, D.C.

This week, as happens every year in mid-November, the Leonids returned, and despite some setbacks I went in search of a stellar shower.

Predictions for this year’s Leonids indicated that early Tuesday and Wednesday mornings would be the best times to see the show. With little interference from the new moon, more “shooting stars” were supposed to be visible.

An e-mail to Maggie Hoffman, president of Penn Outdoors, yielded little help in forming my stargazing plans. A few club members were going on their own to see the Leonids, she said, but they hadn’t formally organized anything.

At about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, I stopped inside the Quad to see what I could find. A few freshman lying on blankets exclaimed when they saw something in the sky. I didn’t see anything and resolved to try again the next night.

Some had better luck Tuesday morning. Sitting atop her friend’s roof on 42nd street, College sophomore Ellie Dugan watched the “faint but epic” shower.

“It was like a techno-rave dance party in the sky,” she remarked.

Fellow College sophomore Greg Barber drove up the Schuylkill River and watched the shower out of his car’s moon roof. He likened the Leonids to “something divine.”

Later on Tuesday I called Astronomy Professor Mark Devlin to see if he could impart some wisdom. The Leonid meteor shower, he said, occurs every year at this time as the Earth flies through a field of icy debris left by the comet Tempel-Tuttle.

“It’s like trying to cross a highway — there’s a bunch of stuff coming at you,” Devlin said. In this case, the Earth is hurtling through the debris field at about 66,000 miles per hour. As the centimeter-sized “dirty ice” chunks enter the atmosphere, they burn, and the atmosphere is ionized, he said. This ionization causes the spectacular glow.

My main setback was that I wasn’t watching in Asia — the best place to watch this particular shower, the NASA web site said.

Devlin told me that Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains would make a nice viewing place, but with no car, I was out of luck.

“Philadelphia just isn’t a great place,” he said. “You want to be as high and dry as possible.”

Scanning my options, I went to the highest, driest place I knew: the Harrison rooftop lounge.

Amid the whispers of studying upperclassmen, I sat watching over North Philadelphia. With the glare in the window, and twinkling city lights in front, my prospects were low. I quickly relocated to the Radian rooftop balcony, but the view was no better there. A hazy orange glow pervaded the northern sky. The shower, I concluded, was a dud.

I wasn’t the only one whose show was drowned out by city lights — and some groups are working to make stargazing a little bit easier. The International Dark-Sky Association is currently lobbying in Congress to “protect the nighttime environment” through the use of responsible outdoor lighting.

Luckily, there’s always next November.

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