Perseid.

I realize that to many of you, these blurry, out-of-focus, star pictures are not going to be so interesting... but for someone like me, who has grown up under smog and light polluted Southern California skies... starry nights are so exciting!

The Perseid meteor shower is at it's most visible tonight and tomorrow morning, but since I work on Monday, Weston, Nolan, Nicole, and I stayed out way past our bedtimes last night to catch a glimpse of the meteors a little early.

And although I only got one picture that shows one of the "shooting stars" (right below!) we saw lots of them! 

The last time Weston and I went to see the Perseid shower, I was too afraid to get out of the car and sit in the darkness in the middle of nowhere (um, can you blame me?) but since there were four of us this time, we felt safety in numbers (kind of.. we were still a little jumpy haha) and sat in lawn chairs off to the side of a dark road, reclined and bundled up, with our eyes on the sky.

So magical.

I've taken a handful of astronomy classes in college and one thing I find so interesting is that when you look at stars, you're really seeing what they looked like millions or billions of years ago, depending on how far away they are and how far it has taken the light to reach us on earth. When stars burn out, sometimes we don't know for years afterwards because the light is continuing to reach us from all the years before. So awesome, right?

I'm pretty sure that's something that you can figure out without having to take an astronomy class, but it's something that had never crossed my mind prior to that lecture, so maybe you've never thought of it either! It's one of the things that has stuck with me the most from those classes. That, and the time my professor quoted MIA before a test, saying, "Live fast, die young, high mass stars do it well." Hahaha, oh man. That one's stuck with me too.