NEW DELHI, November 17: Lt-Governor Vijai Kapoor tonight joined the city in an unprecedented party to toast a once-in-33-years celestial spectacle, instructing the Delhi Vidyut Board to switch off all street lights between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Wednesday to afford Delhiites a grandstand view of the meteor storm.The shooting star extravaganza in the constellation Leo sent the city into celebration mode today, though astronomers predicted that Delhiites would be able to view just 30-40 per cent of the cosmic ballet because of the glare of street lights. The bigger dampener, though, was the news that much of the debris left behind by the Temple-Tuttle comet in the wake of its journey to the sun is just a tenth of the diameter of a strand of hair.Undeterred, socialite Bina Ramani zipped across to friend Naresh Khattar's Empire Estates home in Sultanpur for a ``meteor shower (it's actually a storm) party'' inspired by mediaperson Madhu Trehan. For the more serious business of counting the meteors engaged in this death dance, for they burn out the moment they hit the earth's atmosphere, Nehru Planetarium Director Nirmala Raghavan, having spent the day fielding questions from television networks and print hacks, set off for Hakdarpur village, 15 km away from Pataudi, Haryana, with busloads of amateur astronomers. Reason? The village is still a stranger to electricity, so there'll be no ``light pollution'' to obstruct her view of a phenomenon first recorded in the eleventh century.It is thanks to Raghavan's letter to the LG that street lights are being switched off. ``Sodium vapour lamps are the worst offenders,'' she grumbled. ``They create daylight at night.'' Raghavan spent the early hours of today viewing the meteor storm, which had her phone ringing off the hook since the morning, thanks to eager-beavers who didn't want to miss this experience of a lifetime. ``They were falling like the blazes,'' she exclaimed ecstatically, using Biblical imagery even as she ``conservatively'' estimated to have seen 2,000 fireballs light up the night sky in an hour.In a conventional meteor shower, which is a daily occurrence, not more than 10-20 blazes can be seen darting across the sky through the night. Early today, observers in Israel and France estimated seeing between 400-600 fireballs an hour, racing towards their death in the earth's atmosphere at 71 km a second. The number is expected to peak at 10,000 in China, where astronomers are enjoying a virtual ringside view of the spectacle.Adding a touch of glitz to this starry spectacle was the announcement by Columbia Tristar Films of the November 27 release of Armageddon, the meteorite chiller starring Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler. But unlike the film's `global killer' asteroid the size of Texas hurtling towards our planet at 35,200 kmph, much of Temple-Tuttle's debris consists of particles measuring 10 microns a strand of hair has a diameter of 100 microns; the rest range between 10 cm and a metre, but they'll burn up within 50-80 km of the earth.``For every bright spark,'' informed Raghavan, ``there are 10 faint ones and 100 very faint ones.'' The response to the event, however, has belied the smallness of the particles, which is why Raghavan is praying for what she calls the ``best fallout'' of the ballet in the sky. ``Out of all this,'' she said, ``we may get a hundred new amateur astronomers, and one or two kids with their heart in professional astronomy''.Chander Bhushan Devgun, one of the hundred-odd amateur astronomers camping out tonight at Hakdarpur along with Raghavan, too, has stars in his eyes. But more than the celestial circus, it is the cash registers he hears ringing that excite him. For, Devgun is a mechanical engineer who has ``shifted to making telescopes.'' And each time something like the meteor storm happens, it means his market growing a wee bit bigger.
