Last night I stepped out onto our back deck for a brief look at the night sky. A gibbous moon hung bright and high in the Southeast, and a thick sprinkling of stars were visible, even in the moonlight.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, a brilliant silvery light arced across the sky below the moon, trailing a long shimmering tail like a comet. The sight was literally breathtaking. The largest and brightest falling star I\u2019ve ever seen, by far, it came from the east and carved a graceful arc across the sky toward the west, and was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. From what I was able to learn later, it may have been part of the Orionid meteor shower, an annual event made up of a stream of dust from Halley\u2019s Comet. This meteor shower was supposed to be at its peak early this morning, after the moon set, around 2:00 am. The reports I read predicted that most of the meteors would be relatively small and faint.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t even think to make a wish, but there are few things I could wish for that would be as rare and memorable as this spectacular sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I stepped out onto our back deck for a brief look at the night sky. A gibbous moon hung bright and high in the Southeast, and a thick sprinkling of stars were visible, even in the moonlight. Suddenly, a brilliant silvery light arced across the sky below the moon, trailing a long shimmering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}