Perseids Meteor Shower, next instalment: The cloudy skies persisted for a good part of Friday but miraculously cleared from around 6 pm, leading to a bright and clear evening and night - and as darkness fell I was lucky enough to find myself in an area with plenty of open sky and very little light pollution, with good company, seating, warm clothes, a blanket and even a camp fire! Just looking at the constellations and Milky Way in those conditions really was reward enough but there were shooting stars too - some so brief as to be just a suggestion of a flare caught by peripheral vision, others with a distinct tail and one or two providing a dramatic streak across the firmament. I counted 10 during the course of the evening. The icing on the cake though was the arrival of Jupiter (didn't know which planet at the time, only that it couldn't be Venus) as it appeared above some silhouetted buildings at around 11 pm in the Eastern sky, a big, bright, yellow globe, wh...