On this very November weekend in 2001, I drove the family to some remote location in Maryland to get away from the city lights of Philadelphia, stumbled on a Vacancy sign at a hunting lodge called Vonnie’s, got the kids settled into their first bunk-bed experience, then woke everyone up in the wee hours and forced them out into the cold to huddle in sleeping bags on a big plastic tarp in the middle of a plowed field as the frost formed so we could watch one of the most incredible meteor showers ever.

Two of our kids fell asleep before the peak of that year’s Leonid meteor shower as my wife dozed off-and-on while keeping our infant son warm in her arms (he missed it all).

Fog formed in the field, creating a fuzzy halo around us and leaving, most of the morning, a hole to the heavens directly overhead where ancient comet debris danced across the sky, sometimes producing several streaks at once. Now and then, a particularly bright one would briefly cause shadows on the ground and light up our chilly faces. My wife (when she was awake) and I were dazzled.

The older kids, now teens, remember mostly the smelly bunk beds, the cheap TV, and how they laughed at me for it all. But they did see some shooting stars, and they’ve never stopped talking about the experience. One of them painted the scene in art class a few weeks after the shower, colorful brush strokes against a dark blue canvas. Impression made.

This year only the little guy, who is 5 now, will get up with me to watch the Leonids. He’s not sure what a shooting star will look like, and he doesn’t remember the cold. (And he’s lucky because we’ve since moved to Phoenix. Forecast: clear skies, no frost.)

The Leonids this year won’t compare to 2001. But anyone with dark, clear skies could see up to a dozen meteors per hour plus a handful of “sporadic” meteors not associated with the Leonids. [News story]

If you have kids, see if you can get them up a couple hours before dawn Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Stay out as long as you can — it could take 15-20 minutes before you see your first streak, and you never know when a fireball will appear. (Caution: If you live in a city, the light pollution will drown out all but the brightest meteors; expect to be disappointed.)

I got up at 4 a.m. today to see if the show was ramping up as expected. It is. In about 30 minutes of watching, I spotted 9 meteors, about half of which were Leonids (you can tell because they radiate out from the constellation Leo). Ironically, though the Leonids are known for producing bright fireballs, the brightest shooting star I saw this morning, one that pulsed brilliantly and left a nice vapor trail that lasted a couple seconds, was not a Leonid. It was all I needed to get psyched for the weekend. Hey, maybe I can even get the teens out of bed at 4 a.m. …

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Words & Pictures: Accounts of the Leonids in 2001 and 2002.