Got up and watched the meteorite shower from 4:30 am to 5:30 am
here in Paterson, New Jersey.

Did it laying on the top of the school roof. There was a fair
amount of light pollution as we are in the city, but I found
a nice patch of open sky that was almost exactly straight
overhead. About half of the time I was using the unaided eye.
This gave me a fairly broad field of vision and I saw about
60 shooting stars this way. The other half of the time I used
a night vision scope that has a gain of about 30,000. This
reduced the field of vision, but enhanced the ability to see
some of the smaller shooting star trails as they passed through
my field of vision. I counted about 80 trails using the night
vision scope, so altogether I saw about 140 "shooting stars".

By the way, with the night vision scope I can see many many
more stars than I can with the unaided eye, and even when I
wasn't seeing a meteorite trail, I could see an amazing
proliferation of stars. I also spotted 5 satellites. All in all,
well worth spending an hour of my life gazing up at the sky
at night.

Fr. Thomas McGahee

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