A Midnight Perseid Walk

It's time for a shower!

Tonight we decided to go for a walk along the canal to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. This meant walking for a few miles in the dark, until we were far enough away from the lights of the town to actually be able to see the dark sky. We took a drink, some snacks, and my head torch and a handheld torch with us. Sadly it was cold, and rather cloudy, so we waited for about an hour for the cloud to clear. When it did, there weren't as many meteors as previous years, so all in all it was disappointing. It was raining too, so I didn't take my camera as I didn't want to risk it getting damaged. That meant I only had the camera on my phone, and though it's really rather good at some things, it is next to useless for taking photos of the night sky! We did see some wildlife though, so I took a few photos.

It's not often we see common toads here, so we were very pleased to see this one wandering around. It stayed still while I took this photo, then disappeared off into the hedgerow.

This small was the most interesting of all of the ones we saw - there were a lot! We saw this fascinating beetle below:

If you click the photo, you'll get an enlarged view. Yes - it does appear to be glowing with a blueish-purply hue! (In fact, it was this unusual colour, combine with the sheer speed of it, that attracted my attention.) This is a violet ground beetle (Carabus violaceus). It was moving so fast that I couldn't get a non-blurry photo of it. They are nocturnal, which explains why I've never seen one before. I stood watching this move around for about five minutes as I found it so fascinating!

There were also lots of long black slugs, but I didn't bother photographing them as they were a bit boring! Although I'm disappointed that we didn't see much in the sky, it was worth the walk to see what was going on on the ground.