Contemplating a fortified evening under August stars

By Dan Hicks

Given the anticipatory media hype our annual Perseid Meteors enjoy every year, I have a rare and unique report as to how many of these shooting stars were actually visible from Cranbrook itself.

Our public broadcaster is especially notorious for anticipatorily hyping pending astronomical phenomena, then never following up so as to ascertain whether or not, within specific regions, anybody saw anything of what it had publicly proffered as being some sort of notable occurrence.

Many legacy media consumers may quite reasonably come to believe that announcements of pending observable astronomical phenomena are little more than absurdist hoaxsy filler material (hoaxsy = deceptive, but not quite an outright falsehood).

Lead image: A comet-like pale yellow meteoric fireball , magnitude minus five, plunges earthward as dozens of exploding points of light dance around its head; Maun Subdistrict, Botswana; southern Africa; March 11, 2025. Photo-illustration by witness Stephen J. O’Meara. Sky & Telescope Magazine, August 2025.

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