I think it’s worrying enough that I’m getting more atheistic by the week, but now there is growing evidence that I may have to turn my back on science as well. No, I’m not talking about global warming, although scientists’ ability to accurately predict anything these days is at the heart of the matter.

The matter at hand is the Great Perseid Meteor Shower of Ought Seven, which, uh, didn’t happen.

“Mothers are in for another treat on Mother’s Day,” both The Nation and the Bangkok Post said in the days prior to August 12 (Mum’s Day in Thailand). Obviously they’d both received the same press release from Mr Wizard up at the observatory. The Post’s headline was “Perseid meteor shower to light up sky”, and the story said, “At around 10pm on Sunday night, the Perseid meteor shower is expected to provide a magnificent display of lights in the sky.” It was counting on “up to one meteor a minute”.

The Nation was a less excitable boy about it, moaning about the chance of cloud, but it did go along with Worrawit Tanwithibandit of the Bandit (!) Observatory Tower in Chachoengsao in forecasting “a spectacle”. “Half of the perseid meteor shower will be intensely bright. Most of the meteors will appear white and yellow and will travel at a speed of about 59 kilometres per second,” Worrawit said. And “astronomer Boonraksa Sunthorntham, director of Sirindhorn Observatory Tower in Chiang Mai, said clear skies would allow Thais to see meteors at a rate of 60 to 100 per hour”.

Amazingly, considering this is the rainy season, the sky was pretty clear Sunday night and into Monday morning, building up hopes after a full decade of befogged disappointment. I was not optimistic enough to expect a repeat of what my wife and I saw circa 1995 in Phitsanulok, a town that has no lights. I cannot recall the month, so I don’t know whether they were Perseids or Leonids, but for something like four hours we lay on our backs next to a river and gasped at what was, without a word of exaggeration, The Most Astonishing Thing I Have Ever Seen With My Own Two Eyes.

The meteors were popping out all over the place, long and short, every angle, some in colours, some arcing and almost twirling. The clever people who put together fireworks displays these days are wonder-workers, but they will never come close to that.

The Perseids 2007 were a complete no-show for me, and I gave up a good hour watching the northeast and waiting. A little too much glow from big old Bangkok off to the northwest? Maybe, but I note that starcounter Larry Koehn, who runs the amazing astronomy website Shadow & Substance, spotted only about five meteors per hour from his presumably choice observation post in Clarkesville, Tennessee. “It seemed rather weak in the number rate,” he writes, while vowing to have another look on Monday night.

I did too … and I believe I may have seen a half dozen in the space of 20 minutes. Pretty whispy, and nothing to restore my conviction in scientific soothsaying, mind you, but there were a few.

Somehow the European Space Agency counted enough flashes on Sunday to report that “enthusiastic observers were rewarded by a nice display”. Nice is, of course, a long way from spectacular.

The Perseids are shards from the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at 132,000 miles an hour as we roll through the comet trail. Comets, huh? Because Kohoutek in 1973, Wikipedia says politely, “fell far short of expectations its name became synonymous with spectacular duds”.

“The next scientifically interesting meteor display”, NASA claims, if anyone still cares, is the Aurigid shower on the morning of September 3, “a once-in-a-lifetime show originating from a long-period comet taking about 2,000 years for each of its orbits around the Sun.” Another site cautions that this array could produce a flurry of bright and oddly-coloured meteors … or maybe not, depending on what the tail of Comet Kiess is actually made of.

I will be spared any disappointment in this case since it’s only expected to be visible in the Western Hemisphere. What else you guys got?

Total eclipse of the moon coming up on the morning of August 28! Step right this way! NASA has a special webpage devoted to this one. Five continents get to see it, including Asia but excluding Africa and Europe. The Moon enters Earth’s shadow and, in “a startling metamorphosis”, gradually takes on a sunset-red for about 90 minutes.

I shall suspend my disbelief a little while longer. Go away, clouds. They shut me out of the last total lunar eclipse on March 3 and a partial solar eclipse on March 19. Another partial solar eclipse coming up on, uh-oh, September 11.

So, anyway, what was expecting last week? Something like THIS!