August 13, 2009

Astronomy

Yesterday, when I went on the Google homepage, I saw that there was supposed to be a meteor shower last night. Since we had recently started astronomy and this was supposed to be the biggest meteor shower of the year, we decided to go swimming late and see what we could see. At nine o'clock last night, we laid out our towels and gazed up at the sky. We saw a couple small ones until about 9:20 when we saw a meteor dart across the sky. It shot almost all the way across the sky. After gasping at it we again waited to see the next one about ten minutes later we saw an even brighter one go all the way across!! We waited ten more minutes and not seeing anymore, we decided to head for bed as we had to get up early to see the sunrise, another part of our astronomy class. If you look closely at this picture, you can see little specks of birds.
So we got up at six o'clock to see the sunrise at 6:13. We walked down to the end of the driveway to see around the neighboring warehouse. We waited 'til about 6:20 and the sun still had not risen. Later I went out behind the warehouse where there were no trees. The sun rose at 6:31 A.M. I had glanced down at the cat that had sat down next to my feet to enjoy the sunrise with me. I gazed upon the mountain that the sun had to conquer, but it was too late. The sun had glided into view and was quickly filling the Valley with its beautiful rays of light. And the camera had died just seconds before. Don't worry we have to do this nine more times- surely one of those times we will be able to capture the essence of the sunrise!