Give your loved one a real "fallen star".

Step 2 To catch your meteorite

First, you need a meteor shower. There are several showers every year, and numerous online calenders such as this simple one or this more detailed one to allow you to plan your fishing trip. Another useful site is http://www.spaceweather.com , which also has details of comets that could give rise to new showers.

To make things even more romantic, you could choose a shower that falls on or near a significant date, such as the date you met, your loved-one's birthday or the date you intend to marry.

(As I type, the Quadrantid shower has just passed its peak.)

You then need rain.

When a meteor enters our atmosphere, it is travelling at anything up to 71,000 ms^-1 (about Mach 10, speeds otherwise known as really, really fast). Friction with the atmosphere brightly burns the meteor away to almost nothing. What remains is meteoric dust.

This dust can hang around in the atmosphere for days, or even months, unless it encounters a cloud. At that point, the dust particles act as nucleation particles - they provide a point for water vapour to condense and form a rain-drop.

So, in the days during and shortly after meteor showers, you need to keep an eye out for puddles that have collected plenty of water, but preferably away from streets and car-parks (where the puddles will be heavily contaminated with particles of rust).

Put your magnets in your bag and tie the neck shut with one end of the string.

Hold the other end of the string and drag the bag back and forth through the puddle, stirring up the silt.

If you don't want to wait for rain, you can always go fishing for "real".

All you need to do is find a body of water that has been collecting rainwater without moving very much. They should also be in a location where rust and rubbish are unlikely to have been dumped in the water - a garden pond is ideal.

The only problem is that you will not know when the micrometeorites fell.

• If you want to put a bit more effort into your collection, you could fish about in your gutters for magnetic particles (months or years of rain will have left them there), or set up a rain-barrel to be fed directly from a large roof and allow you to fish about in the barrel whenever you wish (perhaps collecting weekly samples to provide a glimpse of the annual cycle of meteor showers hitting this world we call Home).

When you are fed up with fishing, turn the bag inside out as you peel it off the magnets (trapping any meteorites inside) and take it to your shed laboratory. If your fishing hole is some distance from home, you will find it easier to put the bag of magnets into another bag to carry it back, then deal with it there.

_{(A small warning - don't put the pot full of magnets in a pocket near your wallet. Magnets do unpleasantly permanent things to credit cards.)}

Comments

[Eromanga]

Cool, my world view has been opened up a little more. Would have never have thought of this. Great idea. I'll be out fishing with magnets this weekend - meteorites are absent from my rock collection, this could change that.