Owls, Coyotes, And Meteors

There was supposed to be a decent chance of a “meteor storm” tonight for an hour or so. It sounded like a click-bait headline, but I had seen a few legit sources talking about it, so I went out to take a look.

The odds were against me. The radiant, the point in the sky where the meteors seem to be coming from, was low near the eastern horizon from the US West Coast. Viewing was to be much better on the East Coast and in Europe, where the radiant would be high in the sky. Plus, there’s always all of LA’s light pollution. And right now we’re just clearing out after our first rain of the season, so there was a lot of haze and a few scattered clouds.

I went out anyway.

It was cold, at least, “LA cold.” The temperature was about 54°, which is balmy by Midwest standards for November, but chilly by wimpy LA standards.

The owls were hooting. I heard them for the first time in weeks last night, but when I got home from the office there were at least three of them, maybe four, in the trees just a few houses down. By the time it was “at least potentially maybe meteor storm” time they had moved off a block or two, but were still easy to hear. That hooting can be heard for miles, the sound really carries.

The coyotes were howling. There’s a pack of them that lives down at the bottom of the hill – at least, that’s where I always hear them. There’s a fairly large flood control basin down there that’s all filled with brush and the creek channel leads right up into the wilderness area around Castle Peak (you saw it burning about this time last year), so it would be ideal for them. I don’t know who or what they were chasing tonight, but they were loud.

To my surprise and delight, there were also a couple of meteors. No “storm” where they were expecting as many as 20 to 30 meteors a minute (from a dark sky, on the East Coast, with no clouds, etc) but I did see two long, bright ones and three or four dimmer trails.

Did anyone else see any of them?