We all remember the Apollo 13 drama where the crippled ship had to return to the earth hitting the atmosphere at a precise angle. Too steep an angle and the ship would generate too much heat from the friction of the air and cook the contents, as in too hot. Too shallow an angle and the ship would not slow down enough and would just punch through the curve of the atmosphere and keep going into deep space, as in too cold. The just right orbital insertion would make the ship slowly spiral down following the curve of the earth for over 90 degrees of longitude and splash down without cooking the inhabitants. Meteors follow the same orbital fates but are subject to some unfortunate myths that need to be busted. Myth one is that the shower only occurs at a single point in time. Facts are you can see meteors days to weeks before and after the showers “peak”. But our busy schedules and digital calendars only allow us one hour windows that must be booked weeks in advance when it’s impossible to predict what the weather will be. Myth two is that you have to wait until after midnight when the radiant is high above the horizon. This puts it into people’s sleep schedule which means they won’t even try to look. This last weekend in the early evening at SPOC some of us witnessed some spectacular fire balls. These were slow burning Lyrid meteors that began at the zenith and blazed of toward the southwest. Vega was just peaking its head up over the northeast horizon so these were hitting the atmosphere sideways and spiraling down slowly over a large 90 degree arc of longitude. One of them even lost its bright plasma envelope and turned into a dull red mars like point that slowly faded as it skipped of the atmosphere and returned to deep space, too cold. As we were packing up to leave around midnight people started showing up at SPOC because they had heard about the shower on the evening news. They were going to look only after midnight and only on one night. They missed the good stuff. DT