Does anyone else feel like a Peeping Tom?

Back in the days when I was still breaking out the binoculars on a regular basis, I had an 'interesting' experience with the neighbours. My neighbour two doors down had an awful habit of leaving their bedroom window open all night, even in winter - thankfully I never heard anything emanating from there. Until one fateful night.

I was in the backyard doing some variable star observing rather late into the night. I was about to finish up when I started hearing noises from the neighbours .... which got louder and louder over a very quick space of time. I was picking up my stuff to head back in doors (I didn't really want to hear my neighbours getting it on), when, suddenly, all went quiet.

And then the wife screamed at the top of her lungs... 'you bastard!!!'.

I had to stifle the laughter as I grabbed the last of my observing stuff.

Any observation, even with modest equipment, is capable of revealing rare natural phenomenon.

In this I believe you witnessed an audible binary system with irregular and unstable period of oscillation. These always result in climatic collapse. I hear that there are cases where the number of bodies participating in the system can be higher than two but these are much harder to detect because as N goes up so does the chance that someone has the good sense to close the window...


Mark