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A layered image of the Perseid meteor shower in August 2010 Dominic Alves

Watch out for shooting stars in the skies this weekend

The Perseid meteor shower will be visible in the skies above Ireland tonight and tomorrow night.

THE PERSEID METEOR shower will be visible in the skies above Ireland tonight and over the weekend.

Irish Weather Online reports that weather conditions this evening are favourable for some stargazing, particularly in East Leinster before midnight. Cloud cover is likely in other parts of the country tonight, but according to Met Eireann tomorrow night will be largely clear in many parts of the country.

Astronomy Ireland has said that tomorrow night will be the optimum night for viewing the Perseid meteors, and the organisation is urging people to take part in a ‘Nationwide Perseid Watch’, and to count how many meteors they see in the sky every 15 minutes. The reports can then be emailed to Astronomy Ireland at meteor@astronomy.ie. You can visit the Astronomy Ireland website for more details.

The Washington Post reports that the Perseid Meteor Shower is caused by the Earth passing through the debris stream of the Comet Swift-Tuttle, leaving a stream of fireballs in its wake.

It’s feared that a full moon may hamper viewing the meteor shower at it’s best, but the display should still be quite clearly visible.

If you take any pictures of the meteor shower this weekend, send them into us: tips@thejournal.ie

The Perseids will appear to originate from a point in the north west. Image: Astronomy Ireland

WATCH: Timelapse video of  the Perseid Meteor Shower as seen from Joshua Tree National Park>

Watch the skies for aurora borealis and shooting stars>

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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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