I am a high school math teacher by day and a meteor watcher by night, which is a bad combination in November. This page is my observing diary, kept since a night in March 1997 when I walked outside to take out the trash and there was a comet hanging over the barn with a tail like a searchlight. I had read about Hale-Bopp in the paper and somehow hadn't gone to look. I have been going to look ever since.

Everybody who was outdoors that spring remembers it. Comet Hale-Bopp was visible to the naked eye for months, brightest in late March and early April 1997, with two tails: a straight blue gas tail and a broad, curved, yellowish dust tail. It was the brightest comet most of us will ever see, and it was easy: you didn't need a telescope, you needed to walk outside after supper and look northwest. Farmers around here who never look up were pointing at it from their pickups. I kept a sketch every clear night for six weeks. It won't be back for a couple of thousand years, so I'm glad I finally went out.

1. Don't use a telescope. Or binoculars. Meteors are fast and spread across the whole sky; you want your eyes and the widest view you can get.
2. Get dark. Drive away from town. Turn off the porch light. Give your eyes twenty minutes; a flashlight with red cellophane over it won't ruin them.
3. Lie down. A lawn chair that reclines, or a blanket on the ground, and a sleeping bag. Craning your neck is how people quit after ten minutes.
4. Look up, not at the radiant. Meteors seem to come from one spot in the sky (the "radiant," which gives the shower its name), but the longest, best ones show up forty or fifty degrees away from it.
5. The best hours are after midnight. After midnight your side of the Earth is facing forward into the stream, like the windshield of a car catching bugs.
6. Bring cocoa. This is not optional.

The Leonids come from Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings by every 33 years or so and leaves fresh streams of dust behind it. When the Earth crosses a fresh stream you can get a storm instead of a shower: in 1966, observers in the American Southwest saw thousands of meteors a minute for a short while. The comet came through again in early 1998, last November gave us the fireballs, and several astronomers who model the dust streams are predicting that the night of November 17-18, 1999 could be very strong, possibly a storm, with the best chance around 2 a.m. Greenwich time, which favors Europe and the Middle East. That means we may get the leftovers here in Kansas, or we may get a show. Nobody knows for certain, which is the whole fun of it. I have already cleared it with the principal that I might be useless on the 18th.

• Orionids, Oct. 21-22: dust from Halley's Comet, about 20 an hour, fast ones.
• Leonids, Nov. 17-18: see above. The one to stay up for.
• Geminids, Dec. 13-14: the year's most dependable shower, if you can stand the cold.

Fellow sky people on GeoCities.us: Skywatch: Satellites You Can See, My Backyard Observatory, Kevin's UFO Sighting Reports (Kevin, that green fireball was a Perseid, I promise), and the ResearchTriangle neighborhood.