Want a Wake-Up Call for the Perseids?

Image: Gratuitous NASA sunrise photo

At ELi, we are always brainstorming ways to improve our non-profit, local news-and-information service to you. Well, today, we thought of a special service we can provide this week: a wake-up call Thursday morning if the weather is good for meteor viewing.

As Aron Sousa reported in this week’s ELi on Earth, the Perseid meteor shower may be especially good this week, particularly from about 2-4 am on Thursday morning (August 13). We at ELi will be setting alarms to check it out. So we realized we could send out an alert to ELi readers who want to be woken up, if, when we get up, it looks like the viewing will be good in East Lansing.

Want us to wake you up? You have two options:

1. Send your name and cell phone number to publisher@eastlansinginfo.org with the subject line “wake me up.” Then, before you go to bed Wednesday, remember to have your phone set so that a text alert will wake you up. (Just to make sure we have the right cell phone number, we’ll send you a test text earlier in the week. You’ll need to respond to that to confirm you want to be woken up.) If the conditions are good on Thursday morning, we’ll send you a text. We promise we won’t give out or use your cell phone number for any other purposes.
2. Follow @eastlansinginfo on Twitter and send us a Tweet now to ask us to wake you up for the meteors. We’ll follow you back. Then be sure by Wednesday night to set your Twitter notifications so that a Direct Message will wake you up. If the conditions are good, we will DM you with a wake-up notice.

Of course, you can also set your own alarm and get up to see if the viewing is good! But we thought we’d offer to take one for the East Lansing amateur astronomy team in terms of the waking-to-check.

Want to know where to go once you're awake? Aron Sousa says, "To see the Perseids well, my goal is to look northeast without the lights of Haslett being in my way. So I drive north on Abbot Road until it becomes Chandler Road, and continue north on Chandler. I pull off on a dirt road a couple of miles north, park safely, and enjoy the relative darkness."

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