Long exposure image of a Perseid meteor trail by bulliver via Creative Commons license.

As if it’s not challenging enough to see sky events in the big city, D.C. was plagued with cloud cover during most of the two-day peak of the Perseid meteor shower last week. Thankfully, the internet exists, so here are some awesome photos on Flickr and SpaceWeather.com from people elsewhere in the world, where the meteor shower “lived up to its promise.” The Flickr blog featured some of the very best, but admittedly, our favorite take-away is this breathtaking Perseid timelapse “failure.”

>> Space.com explains the origin of the phrase “dog days of summer.” Instead of literally referring to dogs (as in, it’s too hot even for a dog), it actually refers to the Dog Star, Sirius, nicknamed so because of its location in constellation Canis Major. Between July 3 and August 11, Sirius rises in conjunction with the Sun. In ancient times, some thought that the brightest star in the sky rising with the Sun combined to form the hottest temperatures of the year (of course, we now know otherwise). Read more about it here.

>> We were intrigued by the notice on SpaceWeather.com yesterday that there was a 35% chance of “green snow” in Antarctica last night. This phenomena is kind of a super aurora that occurs when it snows during a geomagnetic storm created from a coronal mass ejection (we talked about those a few weeks ago). Sadly, the CME was either too weak or missed Earth completely, but SpaceWeather.com tells us we could get another chance for one on August 24. In the meantime, check out this ridiculous photo of green snow.