Perseids Meteor Shower, Lovelock, NV - August 12, 2023 My wife signed us up for this event about three months ago. We love traveling and trying to find places where it's dark enough to see a good night sky, but it's becoming harder and harder to do as there seems to be more and more light pollution. This sounded like a perfect opportunity to see some great night sky and also see the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, which this year happens on August 12. The event goes on for four days. We arrived on a Thursday at about 4:30 in the afternoon. It's about 23 miles northwest of Lovelock. About the first 15 miles of the road out of Lovelock is paved and the last 8 miles are on a pretty well maintained dirt road. There was a checkin table on the side of the road when we arrived. We showed our QR code for each of us. We were in a 27 foot class A motorhome towing a car. A dirt road had been carved in the shape of an alien and we were told where to park off the dirt road area. It was mainly small sage type plants. We got a good place to park and set up our rig and then kicked back in our chairs for the rest of the evening. It started to get dark at about 9:15 PM and by 9:40 we saw our first magnificent shooting star streak across the sky in a fireball. A little later in the evening, the Milky Way showed us herself in all her magnificent glory. We only saw a couple more meteors between then and after midnight before we headed to bed. The second day we decided to head out to the Tunnel Camp ghost town. It's about 5 miles further out on a dirt road. It's the site of a mining operation that happened in the 1920s. There was a brick building that was still sanding as well as several wooden home structures, a stamp mill, and, of course, an outhouse that had a roll of toilet paper in it. It was already getting hot (93°) at about 10:30 AM in the morning, so we headed back to camp to kick back for the rest of the day. At about 8:30 that evening, we went to see an excellent presentation by Dr. Cameron Hummels, a theoretical astrophysicist from Caltech. His lecture was on the formation of our own solar system, including the sun, the inner planets, the Kuiper asteroid belt, and the outer giant planets, as well as the dwarf planets there that are on the outer edge of the solar system. He also talked about how Pluto was re-classified to be a dwarf planet. His presentation alone was worth the price of admission for me. Later that night, we decided to try and stay up a little later. Again, we saw a magnificent fireball shooting star. It was a little cloudy, but the light shined in between the clouds through the voids. We saw several more shooting stars later that evening, until the moon came up at about 2:30 AM. On the third day, we decided to drive into Lovelock, to escape the heat, and to check out the cute little town. We got a Lovelock lock and put it where everybody else put their locks in town. Back in camp, we relaxed until about 8:30 PM, we headed back over to see Dr. Hummels do a presentation on black holes, Another outstanding presentation. Not much longer after the presentation started, we began to see numerous fireballs, shooting across the sky. A wonderful climax to a stellar event! read more

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