Sow Wan Jing, 20

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” –Albert Einstein.
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Two nights ago, I decided to give up a good night sleep to try to catch a meteor shower, more specifically, the 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower at the Japanese Garden. So here are the pictures I took that night.

There was a huge lantern at the entrance.

Here are two girls sitting in front of the lake, perhaps sharing about their lives, hopes and fears.

Hope I haven’t startled you!

It’s time for a quiz on rockets and satellites!!! ...at 12:49 am.

Two movies were shown that night- “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Deep Impact”. It was quite overwhelming/ depressing for me considering I had just watched “2012” a few hours ago. It said on the event flyer that they would also screen “Armageddon”. Good thing they didn’t!

Throughout the event, some younglings kept flying sky lanterns (that bright red thing in the sky). It was interesting at first. However as the forecasted time for the shower approached, they became quite annoying.

I got really restless during the movie and started taking pictures of the sky, but all I managed to take was this:

!?!?!?

I began to wonder if I would even be able to capture the shooting stars should I really saw any. However, when I got home later on, I lightened the previous picture on my computer and here’s how it looks like:

See the speckles?

It’s kind of challenging for me to try to capture something that’s so far away, scattered and in the dark... Anyone has any advice on how to do it?

There weren’t many seats around and most people had to lie or sit on the grass to enjoy the movie.

It was a quite a sight to see people gathering, regardless of age, sex and race, just to lie down and look at the sky. It really looked as if we were gonna start something revolutionary. Alas, we were all there for perhaps the same reason, but different purposes.

So that’s it. I didn’t manage to catch a single shooting star because I was too restless. Also, due to the cloudiness in Singapore, the maximum number of shooting stars one could see was 14. Nevertheless the experience made pretty good social currency for the rest of the week, worldwide. E.g. my pen pal residing in Melrose Ave, LA, didn’t manage to catch any too, ya know?

Shooting stars are commonly associated with luck, but you have to concede that there are many ways to increase your chances of seeing one nowadays. As I stayed up the whole night waiting for one, I couldn’t help but wondered if meteors, like everything else, happened for a reason, or just happened...
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Did you manage to catch anything? Or like me, you tried but caught nothing? Or did you rather sleep?
If you’ve done an entry on Leonoid Meteor Shower 2009, please do leave a link!

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All emoticons are from kao-ani.