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First-hand Account Of The Leonid Shower
chongo writes: "The Leonid meteor shower certainly lived up to its hype
this year. At Fremont Peak, CA (USA) we saw a peak rate of
2408 meteors/hour. We saw many bright fireballs.
During the peak (18 Nov 2001 1015-1130 UTC) there were
frequent instances where multiple meteors were visible.
Because of this, we suspect the true rate was likely higher
than 2500/hr." We've also heard from several folks who were foiled by weather, but it's good that at least some people got the full show. Update: 11/18 17:09 GMT by T : BrianGa writes: "If you missed the show, like I
did, you can see some
still pictures and animated pictures." He also points to a site with a preliminary graph of the number of meteors visible on November 18th.
Here in the Seattle are we got up to around 1/min then the 10:00-11:00 UTC time frame. Some estimates predicted a later, larger peak around 13:00 UTC but it was cold, and we were very tired. (We were up then because most of the predictions I found on the web showed the peak then for this area. The universe in it's typical perversity seems to have chosen the lone outlier as the correct prediction.)
Most of those we did see were near the zenith and left fairly long (10 degrees), spectacular trails. Based on what I've read elsewhere this was probably the leading edge of the storm. Even missing the peak, it was beautiful and worth the cold and the wait.
I got up at 4am to watch the meteor storm but it was still extremely foggy. The entire evening there was only about a one foot visibility on the road :(
I watched the sky this morning from my backyard in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where I suppose there is moderate light pollution. Fortunately the sky was perfectly clear. In my first outing, between 7:15-7:45 UTC, I observed a total of 10 meteors in that half hour. I later returned for what was supposed to be peak time around here and watched for 50 minutes from 10:00-10:50 UTC. During that time, I observed 220 meteors. There were quite a few very bright fireballs, and at several times I observed two or three meteors flying across the sky at the same time.
Impressive
Oftentimes multiple tracks visible at once. Very "bursty" activity with gaps of 5 - 30 seconds between sightings, then often several together or in the same part of the sky separated by moments. About one really bright one a minute.
Paths were often at angles to the horizon, once or twice almost oblique. The paths themselves were also often quite prominant being very bright themselves and lasting up to a few degrees behind the meteorite and lingering for a second or two in some cases.
The most astonishing thing was if one laid back as so that the zenith was centered and nothing but sky was in the field of vision there was an almost constant sparkle of *something*. I've done and taught astronomy before but I've never sen this much activity at once - even from this relatively crappy location it was obvious something dramatic was going on overhead.
I'll not attempt to offer counts or speculate on the rate as I was in a lousy location, they're hard estimates to make accurately and frankly I didn't care. It was a deeply impressive sight and I'm thrilled to have witnessed it. In a single hour of viewing I likely saw as many meteorites as I've seen in my life before, never so many multiples at once.
At one point it was like popcorn popping: "Look there... Oh!.. Oh!.. Down!.. Over!.. Uhhhhhhh THERE!"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I opened up our observatory at CU for my lab section (and any others who came by). I was worried that they'd be disappointed after the hype, but everyone who came seem truly glad to have gotten/stayed up for the event. Either I have a particularly good group this term (which is at least partially true) or it was a pretty impressive even.
I can't begin to estimate the peak rate, as I was jumping between staring at the sky and moving telescopes to various planets and nebulae. But when I had time to look east at Leo, I could see at least one meteor ever few seconds (which correspords to at least 1000/hour). Oddly, while the number of meteors/per time was highest to the east, near the radiant, the quality of the meteors was best looking near zeinth or even westward. Many of the meteors in that section of the sky were brighter, bigger and left trails that persisted for tens of seconds. That, and the mountains made a splendid background.
I had one vistor claim to have seen color in a particularly bright meteor, but I was looking in the opposite direction at the time. Which brings up the old lightening-spotting effect: whenever someone says, "Oooh, pretty one!" everyone else looks in that direction, despite it being too late. There is some sort of poor conditioning going on there, but I'll leave that to psychologists.
In any event, if you didn't see these you either were unlucky or you should have gotten up for this. Either way, be ready for next time!
I was up at 4:30 (AST); nothing much happened. At 5:00, the show started; between 5 and 5:15, the sky was nearly cloudless and the display was quite impressive - a meteor every five seconds or so, with multiple meteors several times (once, a short & quick one shot out below the radient; as it did so, a similar one shot out above the radient. Very keen.). Quite a few fireballs, as well (at least three observed). Clouds began obstructing the view at around 5:15, and by 5:30, only patches of the sky were visible, though every once in a while you could see a meteor from behind the cloud cover, which in some ways was more interesting than the meteors themselves. All in all, a great show: some of the fireballs were amazing, and the consistency after 5am was great.
I saw a few with color-- at least one was bright green and there were a few that were green-yellow and some that appeared to be redish. I don't know how much of this was an afterglow artifact and how much of it was real, but it looked stunning. :)
:)
My vantage point was Kerr Lake, NC. I went camping with some friends and we took a home-made dobsonian telescope to stargaze with prior to the shower. The conditions were about perfect. The sky was clear, there was very little light pollution, it was dry, windless, and actually pretty warm for mid-November.
I dont really know how to gauge the rate, but at the peak (5:30-ish EST?) I was seeing meteors about once every second with bursts of 6-7. It was hard to catch them all as they would appear in nearly every quadrant of the sky. After about the first few minutes I had already seen more meteors than I had seen in my entire life previously, so it was well worth the trip.
/joeyo
2^5
This meteor shower just rocked! I went up into the hills at Henry Coe State Park near Morgan Hill, CA to escape the skyglow, and the show was just incredible. I can't even estimate how many I saw (hundreds?), but at the peak they seemed to be coming down like a light rain (a meteor "shower", if you will). Many fireballs died with a bright flash and left a trail that lasted for 10 or 15 seconds.
What was especially fun was that it was so dark in the hills you couldn't tell if anyone else was there, until a fireball streaked across the sky and a hundred voices from the mountain said "oooooooh".
All in all, an incredible experience, it was cloudy only to the east (sometimes lit from behind), so there were tons of long streaks visible (at the same time, different colors, different speeds and different entry angles (not straight out from a central point)). I saw no exploding or splitting bolides, but lots of very persistant dust trails - as the sun was about to rise, they all lit up, and the sky was crisscrossed with them. It was very subtle, but really really nice.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I've only seen meteors twice before, and they were nothing like this. It was quite a show. We saw quite a few of the big ones that left a "snail-trail" that could be seen even if you missed the initial flash. There were several multiples, too.
Went out into the Everglades at 3:00 AM, to meet my photo-geek buddies who had cameras mounted on star tracking systems, etc...
They had a strict no-light policy while running exposures, so you would hear "OK, apertures open", and "apertures closed". (lol)
At first I was disappointed, because it didn't seem any better than last year, but then we started getting bursts of activity, I think at one time I saw as many as 4 or 5 trails in the sky at once, and that was just looking at one quadrant.
The coolest thing was seeing trails that didn't disappear for up to a minute or two, until they started losing shape, drifting in the wind. (wind was almost nil, which was great for photography)
We found it didn't matter which way we pointed cameras, because any direction you looked, you were bound to see one in a few seconds.
I believe I saw at least one meteorite that burst into multiple pieces, before winking out.
We kept on seeing this level of activity until the sun started to rise. From listening to my friends, and my own sightings, it seemed one of us saw something every 2 or 3 seconds, on average.
Even though I have never seen this kind of volume before, they were all small. Didn't see one that fell all the way to earth. (Back in '91 in Canada, I saw one that broke up in several pieces and fell all the way down behind an island)
I had my alarm set for 3:30am PST, but then yanked it back to 2:30am PST, after a news report saying that would be when it started to peak. I woke excited, I got up and went outside for 30 minutes. Not a fuckin' thing. It was lightly cloudy, but you could see stars in the sky.
I stepped outside on my friend's balcony at about 3:30 CST and saw two inside the city limits of a small city through a good deal of light pollution. My friend came out and counted six. We dressed up and rode north out of town. Starting from 3:48 CST until 4:30 CST we counted 520. We stopped counting then, and were treated to probably about 300 more.
Right before we left at 5:00 CST, we both looked over at the constellation Orion. One came in from over the top of his back shoulder and right above the first star of his belt, it split into about 4 pieces. That one made our night, seeing Orion getting a shot in the gut. Also, several times, we would be facing north, and then a bright flash would be in the south, bright enough to have us swing around real fast. It was quite amazing.
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I was watching about an hour outside Charleston SC with a few astro profs and other students from one of the local colleges. Fantastic show. Started off with some meteors from Taurus, then around 1 EST, saw some spectacular earthgrazers. Long bright green trails that stretched across half the sky. At the peak, I was easily seeing meteors every few seconds, and sometimes 3 or 4 at once. As someone else said, most of the more spectacular ones were seen at zenith or towards the horizon rather than from the radiant. This will be one show I'll remember for quite some time.
Jupiter and the Andromeda galaxy also provided some nice viewing while we were waiting for the main show to start.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Lousy weather ruined it for me. We had several clear nights all week long... and then Friday comes along, and friday night it get's cloudy and starts to rain. Saturday came and went and it kept cloudy all day long. I even stayed up 'til 5 AM, hoping to catch at least a break in the cloud cover for a few minutes (and reading Slashdot all night long, to pass the time). Nada.
Back in... '98, I think, the weather was great, and me and several friends drove out to a ranch an hour away from Monterrey, and we saw a great show, too. Nothing like this one, I imagine, but still it was pretty cool. I think we saw about 100 meteors / hour, some with beautiful colorful trails that lasted for several seconds (including one with a green trail that lasted almost a full minute).
Well, I hope I'll be able to see it next time around, which'll be about... 2040 or somewhen close. Soudns like a great thing to do with any future grandchildren I may (or may not) have.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
I saw the whole thing last night, from about 2 AM to dawn, on the side of a mountain above Apia on the island of Upolu in Samoa. It was absolutely perfect, apart from a faint sky-glow from downhill. My mother, my little brother and I took lawn chairs, blankets and mozzie repellent, and settled down.
I saw the first meteor while getting out of the car. It was simply stunning, a long streak of light with a glowing trail. It was one of the best I'd ever seen. Little did I know then that I would see over two thousand of them in the next three hours.
In fact, we would have seen more if we had been able to watch both halves of the sky at once.
It was easy to see the meteors radiating outward from Leo, and the sense of scale that gave me was simply amazing.
The best one we saw was intensely bright, brighter than Venus at its brightest, red, and right overhead. Bits were literally exploding off it as we watched. It traversed at least an eighth of the sky before exploding, leaving a quickly-fading orange trail and a slow-fading green plasma cloud.
It certainly made up for the 1998 Leonids, which were obscured by a gargantuan thunderstorm for me near Canberra. Although the fact that I was ensconced in the back of my station wagon, on a mattress, under a sleeping bag, with my girlfriend did make it easier to pass the time.
I took a group of about 30 or so students to the local observatory of the Lehigh Valley Amatuer Astronomy Society. We had a couple of our members there to help me out openining up the various domes and manning a couple of portable telescopes. They had set up some outdoor loudspeakers playing "music to observe by" and heated up the coffee and the hot water.
We started about observing about 2 AM EST - and in between seeing the sights of the sky we were counting something on the order of about 50-70 Leonids per hour.
At 3:45 AM things started to get truly lovely, so we set ourselves up in the lawn chairs and started counting rates for a minute at a time every 5 minutes or so. Viewing was okay - given the relatively urban setting - with seeing down to about 4.5 Mag and calm atmosphere and high humidity. We counted rates increasing from around 2-3 a minute to about 14 a minute getting close to 4:30 AM.
At 4:45 AM we had high clouds start to scud across the sky, and I gave up formal counting since there would be no normalize the numbers. At our peak around 5:30 AM or so, we were seeing a couple of bright Leonids a minute, some so bright that they lit up the domes like a lightning flash, as well as many (~.25-.5/second) smaller Leonids. We saw a number of truly lovely simultaneous events. The best part was that two or three atmospheric skipping meteors were seen as well.
People from the surrounding area started joining us about 4 AM and we probably had something like 70 people or so up there just before dawn. It was like watching the fireworks on the Mall in DC on the 4th of July with people Ooohing and Ahhhing, and occasionally cheering. My students fanned out in the crowd and I heard them explaining what we were seeing to the new arrivals, and showing them around the sky.
We didn't get to see the full effect of the storm because of the high clouds, but the spectacular fireballs, and the mood of the crowd made in a once in a lifetime event for me. Truly superb!
In illa quae ultra sunt
I definitely agree... I was in my back yard on the east side of Raleigh (fairly close to you). The night could not have been more perfect (well, a little warmer, but I'm not complaining). I saw one meteor streaking toward Orion that definitely was bright red. Most of the colors I saw were greenish blue, though. I'll never forget one fireball that pierced Orion about mid-chest and exploded near the middle!
Eric
In the city... too many lights. As we drove out of the city, the fog got thicker. and thicker. and thicker. You could literally stand 20 yards from your friends and not see them. However, fog generally allows you to see straigh up, so I did see a few (24), including 3 or 4 doozies (meaning, they were really bright.) It was actually a pretty cool experience, because it was fun *and* spooky.
On a side note, any train running near you in a fog sounds like it's coming *right for you*
Sunday evening, myself and gf drove up to my parent's small (60 acre) property specifically for this. Dad woke us up at 3:20 CST, and we sat outside on swags with hot cocoa for the next hour and a half getting stiff necks.
This was definitely something I'm glad I saw. Other people have written great descriptions of what the shower looked like, but nothing compared to the feeling of actually being there, watching the sky being traced with trails of light. One really impressively bright meteorite left a trail that persisted for almost half a minute!
My Grandfather was there too, and he'd seen the 1933 show - which he thought had been better, but then he didn't stay for long (cold!!).
The predicted peaks were sort of noticable, in that there was a definite increase and then gradual decrease in the number coming in, but there really wasn't more than a minute in the whole time where none were visible.
My dad took a few long exposure photos, which will be a nice reminder. If you missed it this time, make sure you're in a good spot in 2034 for the next really good show - it's well worth it...
I think I'll be trying for the Nullarbor Plains, myself.
|>
Here be Dragons
Despite partial cloudiness, we got up at 0230 MST to venture a few miles out onto the eastern plains, away from the light pollution from Abq.
It was worth it, despite the cold weather!
Like the other poster said - I saw more meteors in the first few minutes than in all my life up to that point.
Put the futon into the back of the pick-up truck so we wouldn't crick our necks.
Saw bursts of several in as many seconds, with intervals of no activity for no more than 20 seconds at a time.
Two or three were pretty spectacular and bright, but not discernable as fireballs by my admittedly poor eyesight.
About 2 or 3 years ago on a summer evening about 11pm MDT driving back from the city my wife saw a fireball - I thought it was lightning because of the flash, but then noticed there weren't any clouds!
I'm still hoping to experience a total eclipse one of these years. I presume I'll have to venture away from North America to see it?
"Provided by the management for your protection."