Monthly Archives: April 2004

Farewell Lunch

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Thanks Mike Moran for your always appropriate comments

Thanks Mike Pearson for the many nights at Fado looking at life through a pint of Guinness

Muchos Gracias Adam for “hamming it up” in the office…KG6RBE out!

Thanks Jodi for the always entertaining lunch make sure you keep Chandler in line…in Charleston!

Thanks John for a great trip to NRB and the wonderful biblical insight

Thanks Renee for the great tips on Georgia, and you are right, I should never have moved north of the perimeter!

Thanks Dale for being the best boss and friend one can have…keep the faith Cali is calling your name.

And finally Jeremy, a true friend, thanks for all your insight and keep up the good work on the blog

Tina and I are glad to have shared 10 months in the South…next stop California!

Spring Shower – the Lyrids

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The Lyrid meteor shower peaks on the morning of April 22nd. Observers who wake up at, say, 3 a.m., and watch the sky until dawn can expect to see a few dozen meteors (5 to 20 per hour). The Lyrids are a northern hemisphere shower. Sky watchers in the southern hemisphere should stay in bed. [sky map]

Lyrid meteors stream from a point in the constellation Lyra near Vega–a brilliant blue-white star about three times wider than our Sun and 25 light years away. Go outside any morning before dawn in April and look straight up: There’s Vega, bright and eye-catching. About 14,000 years ago Vega was the North Star. Earth’s spin axis wanders: Now it points at Polaris, then it pointed at Vega. You might have seen Vega in Carl Sagan’s movie Contact. It was the source of alien radio transmissions to Earth.

Although Lyrid meteors look like they come from Vega, they don’t. The source of the Lyrid meteor shower is Comet Thatcher (C/1861 G1). Every year in April Earth plows through Thatcher’s dusty debris stream with a relative velocity of 49 km/s (110,000 mph). Meteoroids (most no bigger than grains of sand) strike Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate as fiery streaks of light.