I have a friend who stargazes a lot. What I've learned is that if you look into a clear night sky for a long enough period of time, you see some pretty cool shit. Satellites are all over the place. Shooting stars are pretty frequent. But just last night I saw something absolutely mind-boggling.

I was at his place, and following a rousing session of LittleBigPlanet, we pulled out his telescope to get a look at Jupiter, which can actually be seen quite clearly after midnight in this part of the world right now. (Looking at it through a cheap telescope -- making out its rings, moons, etc. -- is a very cool experience in a geeky way.) While we were getting set up, we saw something in the sky that, for a split second, we thought was a firework. It was bright enough to light up the entire area for a brief moment, and it burst much like a firework would, and this was Independence Day weekend, after all. But it didn't trail, made no sound, and wasn't accompanied by any other fireworks. I guess our initial logic was that what we'd just witnessed was too big and brilliant to be anything natural.

Well, according to this article he found, people everywhere from southern Pennsylvania (where I am) to central Maryland saw the same thing. About twenty seconds after the flash, we heard a very low rumbling, which the article reports would have been the object breaking the sound barrier.

It was a brief, weird, and fucking amazing moment. I guess it's one of those "you had to be there" things, but us seeing it depended on so many circumstances: We were still awake, we were outside, and we happened to be stargazing at the time. And like I said, what we saw was so brilliant that we actually mistook it for a firework, if that should give you an idea of just how big and bright it was. So yeah, that's the coolest thing to happen to me this past week.

WELL I THOUGHT IT WAS COOL.

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	bluberry - July 06, 2009 (11:29 PM) cool, I thought OD and I were the only ones on here who smoked weed a lot.
	Suskie - July 06, 2009 (11:39 PM)