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Meteor Showers
Nick Davison writes: "This weekend promises another good meteor display with the Perseids expected to be falling at up to one a minute at around 6am PST Sunday morning. The big show of the year, however, is expected to be the Leonids that peak November 18th - they are expected to briefly peak at around 15,000/hour."
This is a great oppurtunity to make use of that light pollution map that was just posted a couple articles ago It's a damn shame that my part o' the map is a big bright white spot. I guess I won't be seeing to many meteors. However, the beautiful colours of all the light bouncing off the pollution in my highly developed area might just make up for it!
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
I was out watching the shower with a couple of friends and we did have a nice display.
:)
;)
I don't know when exatly the peak was but we only had a chance before the moon rise (from ten till around midnight local time) and we were not disapointed. frenquency was about a star every couple of minutes, including about 15 with high magnitude and long trails
A couple of tips for the first timers.
- Get away from the city lights (and pullotion) as much as possible.
- Have a good field of view because they will be all over the sky not just in the vicinity of perseus
- Do NOT concentrate at the spot where they will come from (Perseus) rather about 40 degrees away, as odd as this may seem, the shooting stars around perseus won't leave a long trail (they will be coming towards you ) and you won't be seing much of them.
PS the geeks that we are had to take a laptop to the middle of nowhere with Starry Night on it , as if the real sky was just not enough
http://www.starrynight.com/
...wherever you live. Although there may be a peak time around then, generally the best viewing is before dawn as that is when the night sky is rotated round to face the direction the earth is moving. With the leftover particles from the comet in an orbit crossing earth's, we hit them head on in the morning sky. The article says August 12th between 14 and 17 UT will be the peak, I'll let you correlate that to where you live.
Bleh!
Will the International Space Station pass through this?
One of the problems with having such a large contained area in space is that it's that much easier to puncture it. Lots of small holes would be very bad, although I know the odds of that are slim to slimmer. Still, is there a plan in case this happens? I assume my usual "When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" wouldn't really cut it...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
David Asher at Armagh Observatory has an explanation and plots that answer my question. He and Robert McNaught in Australia have calculated the orbits of debris streams ejected during many past apparitions of the comet. The outer planets perturb each stream differently. In 2001 Australia and Asia should get 15000 meteors per hour from the combined 1866 and 1699 streams. The Americas should get 2500 per hour from the 1767 stream. The 1966 storm was a direct hit on the relatively fresh 1899 stream. They think the numerous bright Leonids seen in 1998 may have been ejected in 1333.
No, it wil not. Meteors you see are actually be little grains of sand, I doubt those will have an impact on ISS. On the other hand, meteor observations is a piece of astronomy that can easily be done by amateurs but that does have scientific value: new models are generated based on the observations, and these models help predict meteor showers (so that solar panels of sattelites can be turned if huge amounts of spacejunk is expected). The perseids are relatively small, members of my local observatory saw 13 in 5 hours yesterday (okay, it was partly clouded). With a huge meteor shower as the predicted leonids (they were predicted to shower enourmously for the past few years, but I didn't notice any of that), things may be different for ISS.
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