On Nov. 17, senior Ashley Flowers sat curled on her roof for three hours with a warm cup of hot chocolate. She was expecting the Lenoid meteor shower – an event she had been looking forward to all week.

“I love looking at stars, and I really appreciate the beauty of meteor showers,” said Flowers. “I just really wish I had actually seen a meteor.” Flowers is not alone in that wish – there are very few reports of students personally witnessing the shower. Flowers says that despite the lack of a show, she does not regret staying up to watch the shower.

The largest obstruction in the meteor shower viewing last week was the partly cloudy forecast. Only on Tuesday at 4:00 a.m. was there a high possibility of catching a glimpse of the shower. Despite this, the forecast was overcast and cloudy.

According to http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors, "shooting stars" and "falling stars" are both names that people have used for many hundreds of years to describe meteors. Traveling at thousands of miles an hour, meteoroids quickly ignite in the atmosphere at about 30 to 80 miles above the ground. Almost all are destroyed in this process; the rare few that survive and hit the ground are known as meteorites.

Shooting stars are best watched on dark nights with no clouds. Flowers says that despite the lack of visible meteors, she enjoyed the night as a whole. “It was still an enjoyable experience,” she said.