Shooting Stars

I am so excited, my two old flatmates are coming to stay for the weekend – it will be the first time the three of us have been together in three years! I can barely think straight, I can’t be bothered to focus on work (shockingly) and I keep planning on where I can take them to best show off my wonderful home town. I’ve seen them individually over the past few years but we have never managed to all meet up, due them being at either end of the county and me stuck in the middle.

We make quite a fun group, S. is the posh one, talks like out of Mallory towers and goes sailing and skiing in her holidays but is the sweetest lovely person you can ever meet, a total grafter, dedicated to training as a doctor. I fist met R. during fresher week and she was a totally skater boi, baggy jeans, no make up and an angry wee soul to boot but again so funny and sweet she just liked to wrap it up in a shell of barbed wire. And then there was me, emotionally unable, hard nut northern lass (well not really but compared to the rest of them..) However, I like to think we made a good team, all of us bonded over our love of and ability to drink, or in S. case her belief in her ability to drink. There was a big group of us at uni, about 10-15 and we had so much fun in the beginning, oh happy happy days. There are so many things I would do different but those stories are for another time, in the meantime I’ll focus on trying to regress back to fresherdom student days – yee ha!

I’m very distressed that I missed the partial eclipse today – I remember travelling down to Cornwall for the total eclipse of the sun (break in to song here) and was so excited and of course it was cloudy but you still got to feel the effects of the darkness and all the birds settling down to roost and the flowers closing. It got me think about the comet Hale-Bopp, I loved that thing, it was so totally amazing to see this clear bright object in the sky at night, spotting its three tails spouting behind it and watching it make its way steadily across the summer sky. During this progression I went skiing to a remote little town in Italy and I remember looking up one night and it seemed to fill the whole sky and be resting just above the mountains. It was one of those moments that inspired you to write poetry, sing, dance, love and generally want to hug everyone everywhere.

I’m a sucker for all this astronomy stuff. Here are my facts for the day:

Meteoroid: Pieces of interplanetary matter orbiting the sun, traditionally smaller than a kilometre and frequently only millimetres in size.

Meteors: Are meteorids that have entered the Earths atmosphere, thus turning them into meteors. They burn up completely when they enter the earth's atmosphere. Meteors are commonly known as shooting stars.

Meteorites: If any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is called a meteorite. The biggest meteorite that we have recovered is the Hoba, Namibia meteorite that weights around 60 tons and the Meteor Crater in Arizona was thought to have been created by a meteorite 25 meters in size.