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Meet The Leonids
Kathy Miles writes "The Leonid meteor shower is promising to be a 'once in a lifetime
event.' It's not hard to photograph meteors, a simple 35mm camera
that you can lock open the shutter on works fine. Here's complete
instructions for 35mm, video and digital cameras.And, on the same site
is information such as lore and myth, best way to watch meteors and times and skymaps for all US timezones. Happy Meteor watching!" And Geert Barentsen writes "As the adrenaline for the final Leonid meteor storm (November 19th) rises, one site seems to do a call to everybody to count the meteor activity and help science. With a few thousand meteors predicted per hour, it's going to be a busy night for true geeks :-)" Kevin Smolkowski writes "For the second year in a row, NASA will have Live Coverage of the 2002 Leonid meteor storm on Monday. Perfect for those of you surrounded by
city lights. The all night show is hosted by NASA astronomers.
They'll offer observing tips, answer phone calls from sky watchers,
and tour the skies with a video camera located at the Marshall
Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama." Update: 11/18 22:40 GMT by T : McGravin writes "Everyone should also keep an ear on the extraplanetary visitors, too. I'm going to go add some ear-flaps to the tin foil helmet that protects my brain from them, so I can hear the meteors."
I have done astro photos before and here is good tip when using a SLR camera:
To avoid wobbling the camera as you press the cable to start the exposure, just hold up a sheet of black paper in front of the lens. After the cable is dangling freely, remove the paper. When depressing the cable, do the same.
Also, for anyone with a Sony DV camera, the AE Candel Light mode works great for filming the showers.
Yesterday was beautiful and I was hopeful but today is looking pretty crappy.
Damn Washington weather is depriving me of the show of a lifetime.
On a better note I will get a full nights sleep.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Eastern Time Zone
Western Time Zone
Mountain Time Zone
Pacific Time Zone
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
It really IS this time. It's gonna be a big one, as the trail of comet debris (left kindly by Tempel-Tuttle, IIRC) that forms this shower is really, really close this year, and it won't be remotely as good for another thirty years or so after the debris trails start getting further away from the Earth's orbit. Not exactly once-in-a-lifetime, but still. I like meteors.
Speaking of which, it's 10:30PM here. I'm off to the beach to watch things and drink flasks of tea.
Other that light pollution which will make viewing difficult for most city dwellers, we will have to contend with a full moon. Your best bet is to look towards the northwest or southwest to diminish the glare of the moon.
FYI, Marshall Space Flight Center is located on Redstone Arsenal. You must be active military/have legitimate verifiable business/have an authorized (clearance) escort,etc... there to get past the gate. This goes for students, as well.
Scientifically speaking, there is a lack of visible background radiation (VBR, also called 'solar drift' because of its origins) in the sky right now because of the unusually large amounts of sunspots, so the view will be exceptional. Additionally, they will be brighter through a process called 'blueshifting' because they are heading towards us. Blueshifting is an application of the Doppler effect with light rather than sound -- the speed of the objects stack up the light 'waves' in front of them and in effect make the objects look bluer because of the shift upwards in the visible spectrum. The opposite, 'redshifting', would occur if the objects were heading away from us, as they will be next year.
Make sure you're out from the city to watch this great event, because light pollution will drown out part of the spectra that otherwise make this such a treat to watch.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
As has already been pointed out, there will be a full moon. Not only that, but at the peak viewing hours for the western continent inhabitants (especially those in North America) that pesky full moon will be almost exactly centered in the most active region for viewing.
Only the best and brightest will be visible, and though there's predicted to be more of them this year than typically the effect will be diminished by the lunar glow to a fairly typical rendition.
Any spoon would be too big.
According to this NASA webpage, "The 2nd-best way to watch the Leonids. A royalty-free image from corbis.com."
I just got back in (Tues. morning here in Japan,) after having not seen a single one. (Worst combination of time, location, moon, clouds.)
:-(
Last year was amazing...
-- My Weblog.
As far as seating goes, i've always found the most success, lying on a blanket [even with a foot of snow on the ground], as opposed to a lawnchair, because no matter how far back you lean in a lawn chair, your neck will be sore from craning in the morning.
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The next time Earth will pass through a thick part of the Tempel-Tuttle comet's tail will be in 2099. There will still be Leonid showers every year, just not as spectacular until then.
You have gotten it wrong. It didn't happen yet! It happens approximately after 4 hours!
You can also hear the meteors as they whiz past Earth.
...use your FM receiver with an external aerial. Try to find a station a long way away (that's the difficult bit, as usually a nearby station gets in the way). Under normal circumstances the transmission should be difficult or impossible to detect, but when a meteor intervenes the signal jumps over the horizon and a brief fragment of the transmission can be heard. Depending on the type of transmission, it might sound like a tone, a fragment of music or voice, or simply noise. Contact lasts for as long as the meteor train persists, usually from 100 milliseconds to a few seconds.
They disrupt radio frequencies and cause them to rebound back into Earth's atomosphere.
This experiment back in 1999 did just that. I realize this is dated but you can listen to them youself.
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For relativistic blueshift, the frequency of light will scale by the lorentz equation:
f' = f * sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
For a 10% blue shift, the relative speed would have to be about 0.4*c = 1.2x10^8 m/s = 432,000,000 KPH = 268,430,000 MPH.
Hell, protons coming off of the sun only hit one million MPH.
High speed meteors hit the atmosphere around 80 km/s (damn fast if you think about it!) = 288,000 KPH = 175,950 MPH. This would result in only a 0.000000712% change in apparent wavelength. Not to mention that it will slow down drastically as soon as it hits the atmosphere.
Besides, there is no reason to think that even if there were any blueshift it would cause these things to be more visible to the human eye. I would imagine that it has something like a blackbody spectrum which will cover a very large portion of the visible spectrum, with the peak concentrated somewhere around the yellow - where our eyes are pretty sensitive already.
Furthermore, optical background radiation is only a few photons per second - not hardly enough to make any difference to the human eye, and AFAIK, sunspots have nothing to do with it. Besides, sunspots aren't particularly out of whack right now: Solar Physics Dept of Belgium (Official sunspot counts).
-- Heisenberg might have slept here.
Go to this site to determine the best viewing time for your location and the predicted count.
Phoenix
>>and it won't be remotely as good for another thirty years
Or 90. Next time the show will be this good is 2099.
For any individual viewer observing the Meteor Shower is a safe event; the risk of damage from a meteor is much lower than the chance of being eaten by a bear during the same time frame.
However - for the Earth as a whole that is not true. If one of the meteors which broke off the comet is only 50 or 60 meters in diameter the result would be an impact similar to Tunguska in the last century; a 20 to 30 megaton blast capable of destroying a city and killing millions.
The chance that we will lose a city somewhere on earth to an impact event during this century is about one in five.
Here in Southern New Hampshire the skies are clear even if they're not dark (full moon plus all the man-made light). I just saw 5 meteors in about 15 minutes of watching, 3 whose trails stretched nearly halfway across the sky and the other 2 were little ones.
Sorry about those of you whose weather is working against them. I'm going back out to watch after grabbing another couple of layers of blanket.
Well... I set my alarm so that I could watch it. (Just got home...)
:-(
;-)
Would have been a real shame to miss it, since I guess I'll be around 50 - 60 next time it happens if I'm not misstaken.
There was som *real* nice once.
Amoung others a double fireball on each side of a bright star and one that left a trail that spanned more than half my field of vision.
Really beautiful. *sigh*
Wish I could have filmed it.
But then came the evil clouds and blocked my view, so I went home.
Btw!
You know that you can make a wish when you see a shooting star!
So what did *you* wish for? =-)
My wish, with every blazing trail, was to pass my math exams in december and januari.
Now I'm going to catch some sleep before going to school. Starts 13:15 today. Lucky me.
Oyasumi nasai minna.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
*sigh* the big storm would be optimal here tonight at 4:50 AM. Well, I stood outside about 15 minutes before that. F**king thick clouds everywhere. It sucks to live in the netherlands :(
Well, spent the early part of the morning on the roof. I'm in the middle of the Med, and there was a clear sky. roused the wife and kid as well, and we all stayed watching. There was significant light pollution, but the show was still okay - my boy loved it (2.5 yrs) - kept running around shouting "Fireworks!, Fireworks!" ;-) - I counted maybe 1 per minute.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.