Major Meteor Shower Next Weekend

IronClad writes: "By some reports, the annual Leonid meteor shower should be the best show in decades, and possibly until 2099. With meteors peaking November 17-18, and particularly over the Pacific, now is the time to check the predicted local meteor flux and buy chips for those star parties. Anyone adding a wireless hub and laptops for a star+lan party?"

Comments

Radar observation

[Darius]

My company makes atmospheric radar systems (eg directly measure winds, or meteor events). We are going to run a campaign in Western Australia (near Exmouth) during the Leonids.

We may even have live updates on a web page during the show (if I write the code in time anyway :)

Already started

[BarefootClown]

Methinks it has already started...Friday night, I was flying a Cessna 152 from Oklahoma City, OK to Indianapolis, IN. I saw several meteors, including a couple of strange ones--one was greenish in color, had a strobe-ish sort of effect, and appeared to be at about 20,000 feet; another was normal white, but again, looked fairly low. I was already talking to Center, and asked them about it, thinking maybe the Air Force was doing some sort of exercise, but they confirmed that there were no other aircraft in the area. There's some cool stuff up there, and even at 5,500 feet, you can see a whole lot more than you can on the ground. I will never forget some of the ones I saw last Friday.

Why?

[purepower]

How come every time I read about an upcomming meteor shower, they always say it's going to be the best ones ever, and the best one in the near future.