I'd like to describe the night I watched the Perseid meteor shower in August a couple of years ago. I was staying with my grandparents in a village in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, far from any big city, so the sky there is incredibly dark. I watched it with my younger sister and two of our cousins.
My cousin had read online that the shower would peak around two in the morning, so we dragged some old blankets up onto the flat roof of my grandparents' house after midnight. At first there was nothing, and my sister complained that we'd been tricked. Our eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and the sky became thick with stars, including the Milky Way, which I'd never seen clearly before. Then the first meteor shot across the sky, a bright streak that lasted maybe a second. After that, we counted dozens, some faint and some so bright that they left a glowing trail behind them. My grandmother came up with mint tea at around three and said that when she was a girl, people believed shooting stars were good luck.
It's memorable for a few reasons. One is simply the beauty; I'd grown up in Casablanca, where you can barely see ten stars, so it felt like discovering a part of the world I'd been missing. Another is the sense of scale. Lying there, I felt very small, but in a calm rather than frightening way. And finally, it was one of those rare moments where nobody touched their phone for hours. We just talked and pointed. I've been trying to find a dark sky like that ever since.