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Comment by nsrivast | Hacker News Reader

Last night at midnight I rented a zipcar with some friends, drove 30 minutes outside Philadelphia to a state park, lay down on the grass and watched shooting stars. Even in a region with significant light pollution [1], we saw clear and bright meteors every 2-3 minutes.

Coolest thing I've done in a long time. Definitely going on the fun-dad-activity-list for when I have kids.

[1] http://darksitefinder.com/maps/unitedstates-8color.html

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I live in a small suburb in Ohio, so I took the kids (5 and 8) out back around 11pm last night and we threw out a blanket to watch. We saw a dozen or more, with 3 or 4 of them being good across-the-sky ones. Definitely one of those moments I'll cherish having shared with them. :)

I live in the middle of the Silicon Valley, where we have very high levels of light pollution.

We just walked to a soccer field nearby. Took out some neoprene mats, unrolled them on the grass. Lay down on the mats, cover up with blankies. Now stay still and look up.

In about an hour or so the kids saw a dozen shooting stars, some of them very bright.

I was too busy searching for Ceres with the telescope to see any of that.

The Perseids don't care much about light pollution, which is why we had great success last night. But other meteor showers are much more sensitive to light.

UK checking in, between our group we saw 4 at a rate of 8 per hour around 22h45 GMT. Personally saw 2 very bright meteors.

What else is on that list if you don't mind me asking?

I'm not the original poster of that comment, but I'll answer what's on my list.

Soda bottle rocket launcher, Pickup baseball games, Solar Eclipse of 2017, spotting the ISS, Ham Radio, Making a forge to make molten metal, 3D print a design of theirs, Pinewood derbys, Electronics & Arduino games, Nerf gun wars, etc.

Drove tp some 4 parks around LA. All of them had rangers kicking people out at midnight. I gave around 3am.

Totally fun to do this. We would make a middle-of-the-night picnic of snacks and get the kids up in the middle of the night, drive someplace dark, and watch the amazing show in the sky.

That's exactly what me and my son did last night. Planned on going to the Chabot Space Center in Oakland where they have an actual viewing event but I fell asleep too early. Luckily I randomly woke up at 3am, grabbed my 7 yr old and drove over to the Windy Hill Open Preserve outside of Palo Alto. Sat in the back of the truck and saw a good 20 "meteors" till we got cold. He was late to school in the morning and I'm crashing at work but I'd say it was worth it.

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