I love watching meteor showers, and the Perseids are especially fun because they peak on August 12. Naturally, I interpret them as the heavens' celebration of my birth. ;)

Hence, last Tuesday, Brian and I drove up to Mt. Wilson after the moon set at 2 a.m., leaving the sky wonderfully dark for 3-4 hours, to drink a thermos of tea and watch the show. We'd done the same thing three years ago, right after we'd started dating, and even found the same spot. After we'd been there for a little while and had seen a bunch of shooting stars, Brian said he had a surprise, then presented me with a specially made "chip" -- a little piece of silicon like the ones on which he creates nanoscale electronic devices for his research.

Instead of a device, though, it has a millimeter-wide illustration on it. You can see that it's there with the naked eye, but need a magnifying glass (or microscope) to view all the details: him and me (in stick figure form) sitting on a rock watching shooting stars. It's an engagement chip, and a prototype for a more durable version that he's going to make (the logistics of which are still being determined, but might involve making the design recessed, or covering the whole thing with a protective transparent oxide coating), which we can then get mounted on a ring. So cool.

After we saw tons of meteors, about all the constellations I can reliably identify, a bunch of satellites, a pretty good number of bats, and a lovely dawn, we headed home to get some sleep (with Xerion snuggling alongside).

The two of us at our stargazing location. It was just starting to get light, but you can still see a star in the sky above us. I had to use the flashlight to get enough light on us for my little camera to be able to take a recognizable image and it's still a bit grainy, but I like it anyway. (You can also see our thermos of tea on the rock to the right of us.)

The engagement chip.  If you look closely, you can see the design in the center. The extra patches of gold are due to an incomplete lift-off (the step where the temporary polymer layer gets dissolved and the gold that had been deposited on top all comes off, except where the polymer had been etched through), and won't be present in final version.

Brian came up with the following caption, which I think is hilarious: "Optical microscopy image of the engagement device under white light. The bare Si/SiO2 substrate appears violet while the metal (chrome/gold) artwork appears yellow. The artwork was patterned using electron beam lithography and metallized using thermal evaporation. The artwork was created using QCad, a linux-compatible free software alternative to AutoCAD."