Wine and Meteors

The Julian Starfest is one of those local San Diego County events I've been to like three times now, but can't remember how I learned of it's existence.  All my friends who know about it appear to have learned about it from me.  At any rate, it's one of those cool events that doesn't appear to advertise much, but still draws a decent number of people.  I think there's a decent turnout anyway.  We got there as it was getting dark and you mostly hear rather than see the people around you or catch red-tinged glimpses of them (no white lights allowed in the viewing area).

Usually, the organizers do this thing around a new moon so as to take advantage of dark skies and whatnot, but this year was during the weekend of the Perseid Meteor Shower.  This meant we had a lot of dazzling streaks of burning space debris in the sky with the accompanying oohs and ahs from the crowd, and low cursing from me having missed it because I was fiddling with the settings on my camera.  A camera that's probably not ideal for low light astro-photography, but I'm not made of money so it takes all my crazy mad skillz to squeeze halfway decent images from it.

Did I mention this festival takes place on my HOME PLANET?
BEHOLD OUR TWIN MOONS!

Big Dipper above astronomy enthusiasts.

I may or may not have managed to catch a few shooting stars that I only noticed once I reviewed my pictures on a larger screen.  There were some planes and satellites floating about up there, but by trajectory I think I can safely guess that they weren't aircraft, or else there is some massive government cover-up regarding unreported plane crashes.

Left side, Middle, coming off the right side of the tree.  Meteor?

Center of the canopy roof.  Another One?

At about 11-ish, we called it quits and departed from the Menghini Winery (oh yeah, this all goes down on a vineyard up by Volcan Mountain (whoa...  Like Vulcan, because space and shit!), hence the title of this post.)  Holy hell, did I just use a weird parenthetical within a parenthetical?  Thought I was doing javascript for a second there.  Sorry.  Onward.

There were still people watching the meteor shower scattered around the grounds as we left, as evidenced by the fact that I nearly tripped over two of them on the way out and the constant murmur of stargazers in all directions.  There were probably more galactic fireworks to be seen, but there was an hour plus drive before returning to San Diego proper.  

Official Website:  Julian Starfest

Bigger Photoset:  Flickr!