Where Did You Watch The Meteor Shower In Amarillo?
It was one of those "didn't know about it unless you were looking for it" kind of events last night.
Normally I'm on top of things like this as my 11-year-old LOVES astronomy, but it snuck up on me as I was scrolling through some news articles.
Last night, May 30, a meteor shower took place, and as NASA put it, it was an "all or nothing event".
It was dubbed the Tau Herculids meteor shower, and it did actually happen to where we could see it, well sort of.
For those that don't know, there was a comet that shattered into several pieces back in the 1990s and this was a chance for us to see some of those pieces in the night sky. Luckily, we were graced with clear skies in and around Amarillo to get a glimpse of it.
I stood outside my house near downtown as I didn't feel like dragging the family out to a remote area late at night. I mean, life changes a bit when you have a 5-month-old.
The peak of the meteor shower was supposed to take place around midnight CST, so we popped outside and started staring at the sky. We were hoping we'd see a ton of shooting stars during the event, and well, we didn't.
We did manage to see a FEW shooting stars, which was actually the meteor shower taking place. Maybe had we been somewhere like near Palo Duro Canyon away from all the lights of the city we could've seen more.
That said, there wasn't a WHOLE ton to see. At its peak, NASA said anywhere between 10 to 25 meteors an hour were spotted in the night sky. So you had to be staring up at the sky for a bit in order to catch as many as possible.
We were pretty content seeing just a few as we packed it up and headed back inside after about 15 minutes, but regardless, it was a pretty cool event to witness. Did you travel somewhere to catch it?