Some tell me that they read my blog  daily to vicariously enhance their lives.   From an issue of Time magazine I am now reading by Angela Haupt: YOU DON’T NEED TO BOOK A FLIGHT to see the north­ern lights or watch a total solar eclipse to exper­i­ence awe. All you have to do is look up at a sun­set, down at the veins of a leaf, or deep into your morn­ing cof­fee. Exper­i­en­cing just a few minutes of awe a day is linked to less stress, anxi­ety, and depres­sion; lower inflam­ma­tion; less loneli­ness; and more gen­er­os­ity and con­nec­tion, research­ers have found. “I don’t think there’s any­thing you can do that’s bet­ter for you than a few minutes of awe,” says Dacher Kelt­ner, a psy­cho­lo­gist at the Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia, Berke­ley, and author of Awe: The New Sci­ence of Every­day Won­der and How It Can Trans­form Your Life. Awe is the feel­ing you get “when you encounter things that are vast and bey­ond your frame of ref­er­ence,” Kelt­ner says, shift­ing ...

  The largest meteor shower of this year is occurring now.  Above is an extraordinary  photo of the Perseid meteor shower on 12August2021 by Josh Drur y ( right ) over Stonehenge.  You also see our Milky Way.  The Perseids, associated with the Swift-Tuttle comet, started Monday morning and will continue for up to five nights.  The best time to watch is near dawn before there is any kind of sunlight.   However, the best night was the first one, partly because of Moon conditions.  From all indications, not worth a bother watching the Perseids anymore this year. These flaming particles burn up by the time they get as close as 50 miles from the Earth's surface. Note that this comet has a 133-year orbit, and what you see is the leftover particles from previous visits. John Denver's song  Rocky Mountain High  makes reference to this shower. Almost all meteor showers are associated with a passing comet or asteroid, and some are named after...