Around midnight to 2:00 am was supposedly the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. When I stepped outside at 11:40 pm I saw one in the first 30 seconds – bright and with a long tail, it streaked overhead as clear as anything. Cool, I thought, tracing it’s trajectory back and observed that it intersected a point in the sky mid-way between the constellations of Perseus and Cassiopeia, indicating that yes, this was most probably a piece of the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet – which is what the Perseid meteor shower actually is, as the Earth passes through the debris field left by the comet.

Unfortunately, that was the only meteor I saw that evening.