Warning: no musical content in this post! Mainly astronomy....

Just a couple of quick updates.... things which you may or may not have wanted to know, but I felt the urge to tell you anyway!

1. I had a job interview yesterday - my first one in months of trying, and as a bonus it involves music! It seemed to go OK, but I won't know the result until next week. Please all keep your fingers crossed!

2. The football season starts today, and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, this blog's favourite player, has already scored a goal! Sadly he doesn't seem to have his full triple-barrelled surname on his shirt any more, which was my favourite thing about him, but never mind. I was also very amused by a story about the unfortunate Leeds United (ha!), in which they talk to a painter/decorator who "refuses to paint red (Manchester United) and will paint the first layer of white over red for free". Oh, and "The thing that riles him most is that Leeds are to be sponsored by a company called Red Kite this season, and a splash of red has been introduced into the shirt." Hee!

3. The Fastnet yacht race starts tomorrow morning, and the weather forecast for the race route suggests that it might be pretty exciting. I'm quite amazed that there seems to have been no mention of it anywhere, and even Sky Sports (who quite often show sailing) seem to be ignoring it. Bizarre. Anyway, I just wanted to draw people's attention to it. If you want to follow it, try the official site. EDIT: The start has been delayed for 25 hours due to the extreme weather forecast. The race now starts on Monday morning.

4. More relevantly, probably, for most people, is the fact that this weekend is the Perseid meteor maximum. Which I'm sure you all knew (it's been in the news, unlike the Fastnet), but I just wanted to urge you all to go out and have a look at the sky at some point this weekend. I still regularly meet people who tell me they've never seen a meteor (a.k.a. shooting star), which amazes me. I have a theory that it's just because they never look at the sky for more than a few seconds at a time. In my experience, if you stare at the sky for 10 minutes at any time or place (well, assuming it's night-time and not overcast), you're quite likely to see a random meteor, but there are several ways in which you can improve your chances.

The first is to look during a known meteor shower, of which the Perseid shower is the best and most reliable. What's a meteor shower? Well, meteors in general are caused by specks of dust or tiny stones hitting the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. This can obviously happen at any time, because the galaxy is full of dust and small rocks just floating around. Meteors caused by one of these are known as "sporadic". (Oh, and while we're on definitions... the rocks are called "meteoroids" while they are floating in space. When they hit the atmosphere they become either "meteors" or "meteorites". The difference? Meteorites are bigger, so they reach the ground without burning up entirely. Meteors are so small that they totally vanish on the way down.)

However, there are certain places in the Earth's orbit where there are clouds of dust etc., probably caused by comets shedding parts of themselves when they approach the Sun. These clouds of stuff are in specific, predictable places, which means that the Earth always passes through them on the same date each year. For the Perseid meteor shower, the Earth passes through the relevant cloud on about 12th August.

Other ways of seeing more meteors (other than looking THIS WEEKEND):

- Go somewhere dark if you can (or at least darker - e.g. I have street lights near me, but if I go to the bottom of my garden, the lights are hidden by the trees and I can see the sky much better).

- Go out when the moon isn't in the sky, as the moon is so bright that it makes other things much harder to see. Ideally you want your meteor shower to occur during a new moon, and - very helpfully - this year it does!

- If you are wandering round in the dark, don't use a normal torch to stop you falling over - you'll lose your night vision and it will be quite a while before you can see in the dark again. Use a torch with a red bulb (or a normal torch with a piece of red cloth etc. tied over it) - that's what astronomers do.

- Try and look after midnight rather than before. After midnight, your side of the Earth is turning towards the Sun rather than away from it, and that means that anything that's hitting the atmosphere is more likely to do so. (For the same reason, bugs tend to accumulate on a car's front windscreen far more than the rear one.)

If you don't read this till Monday, you've missed the best of the Perseids, but do still go out and look - there are still Perseids around for several days before and after the maximum, so you should still see one or two. Enjoy!