Perseid urticaria

Obeying my own orders, I woke up at 0100hrs in the night screaming "Perseids!" and flung out of bed to see if they were flying as predicted. Conditions less than ideal. The Eastern horizon was glowing with the lights of the metropolis of Enniscorthy (pop 11,000) 20km distant. More than half of the sky was cloud-covered and the rest was somewhat of hazy - might have been the absence of my spectacles. Nevertheless I caught 6 meteors, all travelling out of the NE but across the whole visible portion of the sky; one much brighter than the others. I caught rather more than 6 nettle-stings from sitting down briefly on a pair of concrete blocks. I brushed my hand across these to ensure than they weren't soaking wet and was already sitting down before I registered that my hand had been stung. And inevitably, I sat on the same nettle Urtica dioica. Yaroo! but not enough to bring enough tears to further prevent meteor-watching. So this years Perseid-count was a pain in the arse but not a total pain in the arse. Photo by Wilson Lam ripped from Flickr.