I stayed up late and drove to a park to check out the Leonid meteor shower. I stopped counting as I crossed over 50; but, I couldn’t help my dazzlement being mingled with a sense of melancholy when I thought about what I was actually looking at. Which, namely, was not a whole lot. I could see Venus, and ubiquitous Orion; but, the patch of relatively clear sky above me wasn’t much larger than a projection of my outstretched hand. The rest of the sky was shrouded in a muddy fog of dispersed light. It made me wonder what I was missing and how much I might have seen. How strange it will be, when the inevitable future of no night sky catches up with us. Imagine the panic, 500 years from now, when the forgotten sky suddenly flares back into life from a world-wide power outage. Hysteria and Chicken Little.

At any rate, light pollution is a correctable evil.

Besides which, we wouldn’t want Don to miss out on his fun:

A cool thing to do when out eyeballing a meteor shower is to wait till someone is looking at the ground and then say, “Whoa!”