Still giving cloud, but no rain

The weather forecast has brightened up! They still think we'll have cloud, but at least the rain has gone. The only way to deal with the situation is to keep on checking...

Not looking too good now

The BBC site at the bottom of this page is offering us white cloud followed by rain on Saturday. Naturally this isn't all that encouraging, but we'll keep a watch on how things develop...

So far so good for Saturday.

The long-range forecast doesn't immediately put me off about Saturday, but it is still a long way off! We have a nice group for the evening, so it should be possible to get some good work done on monitoring the draconids, if any turn up. It would be great, though not at all essential if you could have a look at night-sky maps for the northern horizon (all the weblinks on this site offer them), and get to know you way around in advance.

I aim to map any meteors we see onto the chart, and submit our findings to the BAA, so fingers crossed - you might be part of scientific history in the making. (Or it may just be cloudy - that's part of the excitement of astronomy...)

we got that one wrong!

It just goes to show you that these things are not always easy to predict accurately. At the time of writing, I don't think anybody on Earth saw the fireball when the satellite finally came down at about 0500 GMT on Saturday!

UARS falling tonight

If you get the chance, go and have a look to the south east just before 9pm tonight. The Nasa satellite UARS is reentering the Earth's atmosphere, and with any luck we should get a view as it plummets to Earth!