On Friday (April 21) Arlene said she heard on the TV that there would be a spectacular meteor shower that night. I checked on spaceweather.com and read that there was indeed a meteor shower expected, but the predictions were for around ten Lyrid meteors per hour. That didn’t sound spectacular to me. But one of the attractions of the Casco house was that it has lots of sky. The trees across the driveway are a good ways from the house and significantly downhill. The sky is much darker than it ever gets in Newton, of course. The moon was in the last quarter, so there would be no moonlight until the wee hours. It would certainly be worth checking.
Arlene and I both looked randomly around the sky, mostly to the north and northeast, for a while. I saw one good meteor moving east to west low in the north. After quite a long while I thought I figured out where Vega was and looked more in that direction, where the meteors should be coming from. We gave up. An hour later I went back outside. Lyra was considerably higher in the sky, and I hoped I’d see more. This time I did see three meteors, and I got a distinct idea that they were radiating from above and to the right of Vega. I was very pleased to see that my impression was a good match for the picture of where the radiant is.
So though it wasn’t a spectacular meteor shower, I did see a lot more meteors than I would have expected just any old night. This was the first time I’ve ever really felt that a meteor shower has a radiant point, just based on what I saw.