August 2026

[gravitylover]

Nice little storm just dropped a quick 3/4". 

[RockawayRowdies]

Booming lightning woke me up here in Rockaway borough

[Snowlover11]

Congrats LI.

[LibertyBell]

6 hours ago, winterwx21 said:

Too bad it's cloudy here now. Terrible timing. No use going outside. Hopefully we'll have better luck with the Geminid meteor shower in december. 

Saw 36 meteors including some fireballs between 2 am and 6 am. I wasn't outside more than 5 to 10 minutes at a time because it was just too cold. Which is why I never see the Geminids unless I'm outside doing something else.

I saw one meteor almost as soon as I opened my balcony door at 2 am and the sky was more than 50 percent clear.  I saw another 3 a few minutes after that when I brought out my 2x54 Sky Rover binoculars.  More on these later. But then it clouded up again and I could even see lightning in the distance. I wish I'd gone out there before 2 am. The next period of clearing started at 3:30 and between then and 4 am I saw another 11 meteors for a total of 15. This is when one of the brightest fireballs I have ever seen happened in the Western sky followed by a dark tail of smoke and dust that stayed in the air for a few seconds after the fireball was gone. That tail of dark smoke was about half an inch thick and it looked like a plane on fire that was about to crash to the ground! This was so much more exciting than any thunder storm could ever be! There were a few more really bright meteors after that that I could see right through the clouds, these Galilean binoculars can not only sharply define the texture of clouds (like waves in the ocean) as long as the clouds aren't very thick they can actually see through the clouds and show thousands of stars and even star clusters that lie beyond them. I could see stars and even meteors right through flashes of silent lightning! Between 4 am and 5 am I saw another 20 bright meteors including some slow ones that I watches for 30 seconds or longer as they moved from one part of the sky to the other. So 35 shooting stars by 5. And then the sky brightened up around 5 am and the only object visible was Jupiter in the southwestern sky. The birds had even woken up and started to sing and I was ready to get up and go inside when lo and behold a bright fireball lit up the western sky right next to Jupiter at 5:30 am! This was a fireball just as bright as the one I saw much earlier but this was visible in the bright blue morning sky! This is the second latest I've ever seen one, during my first Perseids viewing back in 1986 exactly 40 years ago I saw a bright fireball with a long lingering tail pass to the north of me on Long Island at around 5:45 am. In each of these cases the fireballs were brighter than Venus! This was shooting star number 36 and I'm hoping tonight has a repeat performance as the Perseids have a two night peak.

By the way did you notice there was a solar eclipse yesterday? I noticed color changes like we usually get during a partial eclipse between 1 and 2 in the afternoon which surprised me because the sun was only 9 percent covered. It was a total solar eclipse in Greenland. Iceland, Portugal and Spain. 

 

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, Mr Senior said:

I desperately need the A.C. on all summer. I'm not comfortable in the heat at all, so my electric bill is high in the summer. I actually do much better in the cold.

What kind of AC do you have? Last year's summer was very hot and I ran it all the time too but my electric bill was never more than 200 a month. I used just one 5000 BTU window AC. I didn't care how hot the rest of the house was because I didn't spend much time in the other rooms. 

This house is much cooler because it's well insulated and shaded by trees and I've only ran the AC three times, twice in July and once so far in August.

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, MarcmmKU said:

Also as bluewave says, summers have been more front loaded as of late. The last seriously hot late summer was back in 2023 with a run of mid 90s the first week of september.

September is an extended summer month even when it doesn't hit 90 it's still extremely warm and humid. The first half of September is generally warmer than the first half of June and is still part of summer. While the first half of June is not.

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, MarcmmKU said:

Climo does start fighting back hard. Late august and september are the time of year with the steepest declines in the highs. Yes 90s can happen but it gets significantly harder than in june and july. Also interesting take that anything less than 90s and upper 80s is "cold". Are you a reptilian? 

First half of September is generally warmer than the first half of June. I've had lows in the 40s in the first half of June a few times.

The high the last two days has been in the upper 70s here.  That's okay.  It was in the mid 60s here and windy last night and it felt cold viewing the Perseids.  I kept coming inside for 10 minutes each time  after spending 10 minutes outside each time between 2 and 6.

[LibertyBell]

18 hours ago, BobbyHolikWillFindYou said:

Partial eclipse at 1:54pm!

The landscape had that strange dusky orangeish color between 1 and 2 pm which surprised me because we were nowhere near the total eclipse area we only had 9 percent coverage.

I didn't take any pictures of it or the Perseids because we were in and out of clouds but the view through my new 2x54 constellation binoculars felt like looking at an astroimage live!