And now it is later! I did blog yesterday, honest, time on the post above was 11:59pm.
Reason for not doing a proper blog was that I was out on a hillside watching meteors and getting very cold, then in my back garden on a sun lounger watching meteors with a cup of coffee and getting less cold. The Perseid meteor shower was peaking last night and while I didn't see a huge amount - maybe 25-30 or so, all told - a few of them were spectacular. There will still be a fair few zooming in tonight, possibly a lot, so it's still worth going out. Have a glance at the Jodrell Bank Meteor detector - what you're looking for is brightly coloured blobs (perhaps not as spectacular as their highlights page, but it gives the gist) and if you see a few it's worth going out. Face roughly north-east (look for Cassiopeia, it looks a bit like a wonky-W) and lean back - deckchair, lounger, blanket on the ground, whatever. And don't worry about finding somewhere too "dark skies", if you can see a few stars it's fine - in fact, if you can see Cassiopeia then it's more than good enough.
And then wait. You may have to wait for a long time, and you will think you've seen a few by the time you actually do see one; the eyes play tricks. But then you will actually see one and you'll not mistake it for anything else. To make sure that you definitely have seen one look along the line of it and it will have appeared to have come from a point in the north-east, just below Cassiopeia - that's the constellation of Perseus, hence the shower is called the Perseids. The techincal term for that is the "radiant" because the shower appears to radiate from there. As to why it does - it's the same reason why when you're driving into snow it appears to be radiating from right in front of you. The Perseids are debris from a comet's tail sitting about minding their own business when the Earth drives into them, and just like the snow we see them radiate from our direction of travel.
You might be lucky and see other meteors too, other random bits of debris that just happen to hit the atmosphere. I saw two last night, and one of them was spectacular - slow, bright, and with a tail that took seconds to fade.
But what happens if you don't see anything? Well, why not look for other things? Look for satellites; they're bright and fairly quick moving and thanks to our modern world you'll see several an hour. Look for the International Space Station and Iridium flares - hurrah, I've already blogged on them. Look for the planets - there's a nice interactive sky chart at Astronomy Now or there's cheap apps available for many mobile phones and PDAs.
And here's a little project for later in the year; how to find a nebula without any kind of telescope. First you need to find Orion; check the charts above and you'll see that this is definitely a project for later in the year or early next. Anyway, Orion is easy to recognise; it's compact, distinctive and the three stars of Orion's belt stand out very clearly. Below Orion's belt are a couple of "stars", that often are used to form the sword hanging from his belt. If you look at them you'll see that they look a bit fuzzy. Congratulations, you've just seen a nebula. In particular, you've seen M42 - the Orion Nebula. In you have binoculars have a look - track down from the belt and you'll start to see a little bit of shape to the fuzz. With a telescope you can start to see colours and more shape. But if you have access to a space telescope (say Hubble) you can see this...
And frankly I can't follow that!
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