No Meteors, So Some Pictures of a Sunset Instead

The Great Valley is great sometimes, but not if you want to see astronomical phenomena. We have some of the worst air pollution in the nation, along with considerable light pollution. So most years when the Perseids Meteor Shower comes along, we try to find our way up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada for some really dark skies. Besides, it hit 106 degrees yesterday, and it just HAD to be a bit cooler if we could make it a few thousand feet up into the mountains.

The sun was dropping low towards the horizon when we found a wide spot on the highway near Pinecrest Lake. It offered a really fine view towards the Dardanelles country and westward down the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River (the opening picture of the post).

The mountains around the Dardanelles don't look like your typical Sierra Nevada peaks: they look more like flat-topped mesas in the picture above. They are not composed of granite, but instead are the remnants of lava flows and volcanic mudflow deposits that erupted from a volcanic center that was similar to today's Cascades. The difference? These eruptions were happening 9-10 million years ago, and the volcanic center died away. Erosion took over and stripped away most of the volcanic rocks except for these remnants.

We were getting a little concerned about the cloud cover. Huge thunderheads had been building over the eastern Sierra, and some clouds were starting to spill over the mountains towards the west. Lousy for looking at meteors, but maybe nice for sunset. Or a lightning show...

 The sun broke through and lit up the forest behind us and the sky to the west turned to fire.

There's not that much to say about it geologically. I suppose I could mention the sun pillar, caused by the sun's rays reflecting off ice particles in the clouds. Or I could just say enjoy the sunset...

I'm a real sucker for beautiful sunsets. Anyway, the clouds didn't clear and we didn't see a single meteor, or a flash of lightning. But I'm not complaining one little bit...

Stargazing Chronicles

Got a slightly late start on the search for Perseid Meteor Shower, but headed up last night to Pinecrest Lake at just short of 6,000 feet in the central Sierra Nevada of California, set up our folding chairs on the beach to watch the sunset, twilight and deep night. We were breaking the rules by doing our stargazing before midnight, since the best meteors are supposed to come later when the our part of the planet is facing the oncoming chunks of rock. Prior to midnight, the only ones you are supposed to see are catching up to the earth.

Just the same, it was a great night for watching space chunks die a fiery death in the atmosphere. We saw dozens and dozens of them, some seeming to cross the sky, leaving a bright trail in their wake. Sitting and watching for many hours allows for nice long conversations about Life, the Universe and Everything*. So often we think of the sky as a one dimensional canvas, when there is huge disparity in the distances between objects. The planes that fly by are 5 or 6 miles away. The meteors are burning up in the uppermost parts of the atmosphere, maybe 30 miles away. The passing satellites are a hundred or more miles away, and Saturn, which was up in the southern sky last night, is millions upon millions of miles away. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is four and a half light years away (light travels 186,000 miles per second; a light year is the distance that light travels in one year). The majority of the visible stars in the cosmos (there are 3,000 or so) are hundreds of light years distant, and the Milky Way Galaxy ranges across tens of thousands of light years. We see only the most local part of our Galaxy, which is 50,000 light years across. The most distant object we can see with our eyes is the Andromeda Galaxy, our "neighboring" galaxy. It is 2 million light years from us.

I was playing with my camera a bit in the darkness. I can leave the shutter open for as much as 30 seconds, which is how I got the photo above. The dark patch on the right is some trees. The Milky Way crosses the picture diagonally. Click on the picture for the larger view.

If you missed the main meteor show these last two nights, it is not too late. There will be an elevated number of shooting stars for a few more days. Just be sure to find a dark place far from city lights. It's a wonderful way to spend an evening!

*with fond wishes to our too quickly departed Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe"