The past couple of clear days have felt like a respite to breathe. Between punishing waves of wildfires taking charge of the sky with menacing intent and parts of our bookstore family facing unfair challenges, it can be hard to keep perspective on things. It helps to remind yourself: look up once in a while.

Tonight, for example, the moon becomes new, an evocative way to say it all but disappears— and in the small hours after midnight, tonight and again tomorrow night, the Perseids come down through that extra-dark sky.  No moonlight, no competition, and one of the darker skies in the Lower 48 sitting a forty-minute drive up Hurricane Ridge Road. This does not happen every year.

So this letter looks up. The third installment of our Field Guides to Field Guides is about weather, sky, and the air over this place — what to carry up the hill, what to read when you get home, and the one book that explains why our weather is the way it is.

After that: chamber music at the end of the month, a fall that is already filling up, and the usual pile of new books.

The Perseid meteor shower peaks in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday night, August 12, into Thursday morning, August 13 — best between roughly midnight and four in the morning, when the radiant climbs highest. Under a genuinely dark sky, you might see 50 to 90 meteors an hour.

What makes 2026 unusual is the Moon: it went new at 10:36 AM on this morning, leaving the sky essentially moonless during the best viewing hours on both nights. Nothing to wash out the faint ones.

Where to go: Hurricane Ridge, where the road is open 24 hours a day through mid-October. The dark sky telescope program in the Ridge parking area runs August 12–18, 10:00 to 11:30 PM — volunteers, real telescopes, no charge beyond the park entrance pass. If the weather looks doubtful, call 360-565-3131 after 2 p.m.; that recording tells you whether the program is on.

The Dungeness Recreation Area bluff outside Sequim is free after dark and a shorter drive. Sunset is about 8:30 PM right now. It isn't properly dark until about 10:35 PM, and it stays dark until about 4:20 AM.

Our field guide to field guides idea as always: for each thing you are actually doing, one guide to throw in the pack and one to keep on the shelf. What is different about the sky is that the pack guide has to work in the dark, in your hands, without a screen ruining your night vision.

To take up the mountain? You want something that works at our latitude, and the thing we can put in your hands tonight is Night Sky (James Kavanagh, Waterford Press), a folding laminated card with the moon, the planets and the seasonal constellations, which survives being set down in wet grass. Alongside it, Constellation Finder (Dorcas Miller) is a better teacher: it walks you through the patterns rather than just labeling them, and it is small enough to forget you are carrying. (The classic answer here is a planisphere — a rotating star wheel set for 40–50° north, which is exactly us at 48.1. Ours is on order; ask and we will tell you where it stands.)

To keep by the chair? NightWatch (Terence Dickinson) is the standard, spiral-bound so it lies flat next to a telescope, and the one we hand people who want this to be a habit. The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey — the same H. A. Rey, of Curious George fame — redraws the constellations so they finally look like the things they are named for. It works on adults. It works even better with kids as young as six, we can tell you from experience.

For clouds and weather? The Cloudspotter's Guide (Gavin Pretor-Pinney) is the most-loved book in this whole category — we have sold more than a hundred copies out of this store over the years — and it is less an identification manual than a reminder that looking up is pleasurable, available to anyone, and free, day or night. The Secret World of Weather (Tristan Gooley) teaches you to find the small clues: which way the leaves are turning, what a certain cloud over a particular ridge means in the next hour.

For the dark itself. The End of Night (Paul Bogard) travels from the brightest places on earth to the darkest, and will change how you feel about the light over your own driveway. Nightfaring (Megan Eaves-Egenes) is the newest addition to this genre, while Craig Childs’ The Wild Dark (Torrey House) offers the most Western-centric perspective.

If you only buy one: The Weather of the Pacific Northwest by Cliff Mass. Here is the one that explains why the rain shadow exists, what the summer smoke is doing and where it comes from, and much more. The second edition added chapters on wildfire. There is no book about the Olympic rain shadow; this is the chapter that stands in for one, and it is worth the whole volume.

The bonus pick is The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower: Freeman Dyson designing spacecraft while his son George builds a kayak and disappears into the coastal channels north of here. Sky and saltwater in the same book.

The festival James Garlick and Richard O'Neill started here in 2018 runs nine days at the end of the month. It opens Saturday the 22nd at 7:00 at Field Hall with a world premiere — Gabriela Lena Frank's El Mundo — alongside Respighi and Dohnányi, and closes Sunday the 30th at 3:00, also at Field Hall, with pianist Jeremy Denk and the Takács Quartet playing Mendelssohn, Beethoven's Tempest sonata, and the Franck quintet. The two concerts in between, at Maier Hall, are already sold out, which tells you what to do about the two that are not.

Two of the musicians coming through are also writers, and we will have both on the shelf. We are arranging to have them signed while they are in town — stop in, or call and we will set one aside. Tickets and the full program at musiconthestrait.org.

The Field Arts & Events Hall opens Everyone Deserves to Be Seen on Friday, August 21, with a reception that evening — a black-and-white show by Steve Raber, a Port Angeles High grad who went on to shoot the late-night club scene in mid-eighties Los Angeles. He'd spend half an hour with a stranger and come away with a portrait that treated them with real dignity. Raber has since passed, and the exhibit is the first chance many of us will have to see the work together.

The artist coordinating the show, Joyce Nadig, has printed Shaping of a Photographer, a self-published book that traces how he found his eye. We'll have copies for the run of the exhibit. Come by and page through one.

The fall fills up fast here, so here is what you need to know!

One last note for August: Annie Leonard — co-author of The Story of Stuff — is dropping by on Thursday, August 20 to sign copies of Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It, written with fellow lifelong activist André Carothers. Out this year from Patagonia, it's a short, plainspoken case for peaceful protest as a democratic right worth protecting ($40, hardcover). We'll have signed copies on the shelf after. Come say hello.

Thursday, September 10, 5:30 — Lands and Letters meets at the North Olympic Land Trust office to talk about In Trees by Robert Moor. Copies are at the store; mention the book club at the counter and a fifth of the sale goes to the Land Trust. The room seats about twenty and it filled in May, so a quick reply helps us plan chairs and cookies.

Thursday, September 17, 5:30 — Robert Moor himself, in conversation with Lynda Mapes at the Dungeness River Nature Center.

Wednesday, October 7, 6:00 — Lyanda Lynn Haupt on Among the Birds: Field Notes from Cascadia, at the River Center with Olympic Peninsula Audubon. The book is out September 1 and we are taking preorders now.

October 9–11 — the Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival takes over the City Pier. Free, three days, and reliably about twelve thousand of your neighbors.

October 17–18 — the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, on the waterfront and at The HUB, with Graham Steinruck giving the Friday keynote at Field Hall.

Saturday, October 24 — the second annual Port Angeles Book Fair, at Field Hall. Free to walk in, local authors at tables all afternoon, readings in the side room.

Also worth your attention: Richard Osman's The Impossible Fortune, the new Thursday Murder Club, out in paperback as of last week. Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America returns in a fiftieth-anniversary paperback edition on the 25th — fifty years of the book that started an argument American agriculture is still having.

The page is up and the cards are on the counter. We turn forty this year and we are still collecting memories — a book you found here, your first time through the door, a staff pick that landed, an afternoon in the stacks. Two sentences or two pages, we read all of them.

Share it at portbooknews.com/40, or email info@portbooknews.com with "40 Years" in the subject.

There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Written by a man who spent a lot of nights outside paying attention.

Take it literally tonight: set an alarm for three in the morning, drive up the hill, and let the sun be a star for a while.

One more night worth setting an alarm for:  Thursday the 27th, when the moon rises already about 93% eclipsed by the earth's shadow, deepest near 9:15, low in the east-southeast. You want an open view that direction — the Strait obliges. No equipment, no drive up the hill, no good reason not to look up.