Geochange Science Society

I had the pleasure of witnessing the Perseids this past weekend on Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, BC.
It was truly amazing since I wondered into the darkest portion of the City of Victoria not knowing I would stumble into a meteor shower. 

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

I laid on the dry brown native grasses on the gentle sloping hill to the water from the top of the hill.   I was over looking the Juan de Fuca Straight which is a large black basin of water on that night.  The sky was clear and it was almost maddening waiting out the blackness until another lightwork flew through my view in magnificent velocity.    In the meantime I was tracking satelites and wishing I knew more constellations.

One meteor was so birght and low in the atmosphere that it created a high altitude jet streak and was as bright as a magnesium strip lit on fire. Truly amazing.

Here is some wiki on the event.
The Perseids (pronounced /ˈpɜrsiː.ɨdz/) is the name of a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. The name derives in part from the word Perseides (Περσείδες), a term found in Greek mythology referring to the descendants of Perseus. The stream of debris is called the Perseid cloud and stretches along the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud consists of particles ejected by the comet as it travels on its 130-year orbit. Most of the dust in the cloud today is around a thousand years old. However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that was pulled off the comet in 1862.[1] The rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than for the older part of the stream.
A multicolored, long Perseid striking the sky just to the left of Milky Way in 2009

The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the earliest information on this meteor shower coming from the Far East.[2] Some Catholics refer to the Perseids as the “tears of St. Lawrence”, since 10 August is the date of that saint’s martyrdom.[3]
The 2010 Perseids over the VLT

The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the peak in activity being between August 9 and 14, depending on the particular location of the stream. During the peak, the rate of meteors reaches 60 or more per hour. They can be seen all across the sky, but because of the path of Swift-Tuttle’s orbit, Perseids are primarily visible in the northern hemisphere.