Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wasn't last year's Leonid meteor shower also a once-in-a-lifetime event? I thought this was more like an ~80-times-in-a-lifetime thing.
If you're not surrounded by insane light pollution ... make a point of watching this while you can. It may not be the same for years, maybe decades ...
Or is the Leonid shower billed as "once in a lifetime" every year?
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.
when I spent three hours laying on my back on a sleeping bag looking into the cloudless northern Arizona sky only to see eight super no-big-deal falling stars. What a waste of time due to net hype - I can't believe I'm going to do it again.
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
I hope you never watched him shower...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Everyone said I was crazy when I moved 30 miles out from the city. Now, with no city lights, I'll have a perfect view of the shower! Won't all of my friends be jealous! ...Oh yeah. None of my friends care about meteor showers...
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Well shit. It's a bit late for that now. Oh well, I'll try and remember that in 30 years when the next one comes around.
Well, I have to admit that watching Leonid Breezhnev take a shower is not something that you can see everyday, but I think I'll pass anyway, thank you.
Best Windows Freeware
Asking Slashdotters.. To go outside.. I don't know if this is an insult or a mistake.
Eastern Time Zone
Western Time Zone
Mountain Time Zone
Pacific Time Zone
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
NASA has their own channel? They really could have used that during Apollo 13 instead of lying to Tom Hanks and the boys.
For the second year in a row, NASA will have Live Coverage of the 2002 Leonid meteor storm
I wonder how they did this last year. Or did Nasa finally perfect its tachyon transceiver?
...at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama.
"Uh..oh, I did it wrong again. "Break one-nine." Houston! It's dark as crap up here. Ed's done busted out the capsule window trying to hit a satelite with a beer bottle and you need to instruct us on unclogging the toilet because they ate all the freeze-dried chili and they're tore up something fierce.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Anybody notice the stock photo in the NASA page? This picture. I think it's supposed to representing watching TV, but it's really a sad social commentary.
Here's a young boy, ready to go outside and move and run and play. He's got his cap on, and he's got his football under his arm.
But instead of choosing to play in the sun and use the arms and legs nature gave him to enjoy himself, he sits sullen and emotionless in front of a TV.
He chooses the bland garbage spewed forth by the corporate-run media, enticing him to stay on the couch, not to question authority, not take care of his health. They hope to sell him fast food, video games, and heart medication when he grows up.
Really quite sad.
Alternate explanation #1:
This poor little girl wants to play with her dolls and talk with her friends. But her father is a violent man, who regrets never having had a son before his wife's untimely demise. He forces her to hold a football and watch the game on TV. If she resists, she is soundly beaten. She quietly assumes the role of the son her father never had.
Really quite sad.
Alternate Explanation #2:
It's raining and the game was just cancelled.
Really quite sad.
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.
This will provide some interesting propagation on the VHF and UHF ham bands. Hopefully I'll be able to stay awake long enough to work a few stations on the ionized trails the meteors leave behind..
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
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.
"For the second year in a row, NASA will have Live Coverage of the 2002 Leonid meteor storm on Monday" How exactly can you have 2 years of coverage of the 2002 Leonid meteor storm?
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.
I happened to be on a flight a few years ago (I think 1999) when it was a good year for the meteor shower. The show is even more fantastic from up above the clouds. The many colors you could pick out easily paid for the fare of the flight by itself, not that I planned it that way.
Too bad I can't justify getting up in a plane this year for the shower.
According to this NASA webpage, "The 2nd-best way to watch the Leonids. A royalty-free image from corbis.com."
Asking Slashdotters.. To go outside.. I don't know if this is an insult or a mistake.
So that's what this is all about? All this talk about a shower was making me nervous.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
you know, on the TV screen...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Will anyone from San Diego (or thereabouts) be checking this out? I'm considering taking my jeep out to Ocotillo Wells (out past Julian on the 78.) If anyone is interested in a convoy, lemme know. I went out there a couple years ago (Summer 2000) for a shower and it was a good time.
It's desert, but folks with cars have no problems getting there. Luckily the sand is well packed, 4-wheel drive is not necessary (though to go beyond the dunes it is highly recommended.)
--
[McP]KAAOS
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
One per second for a couple hours in Colorado on morning of the 18th in 2001.
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.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
What? My old Physics classes taught me that this happens only when objects are moving at a relative speed that is a significant percentage of the speed of light. I doubt these meteors will be moving that fast.
And besides, what will be visible will be the trails of the meteors, which will be pretty much stationary, thus precluding any such shift in color.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
For the last big meteor shower, I drove east for over an hour before I could start to see stars, and then parked in a private driveway to see.
Just make sure it doesn't focus on the paper, or you'll be taking pictures at 4 inches, instead of infinity.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I have a seven-month old baby girl/early morning alarm clock so was fortunate enough to be woken at 2.30am but sadly hardly any were visible here in Auckland... even with clear skies. The moon wasn't too much of a problem either - very bright but far enough removed that it didn't blot out the part of the sky (north east) that I was watching. Saw one or two though... Hope you enjoy it in the north you lucky dogs.
I am a leaf on the wind
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.
4B4556494E
The first link promises "complete instructions for 35mm, video and digital cameras," but the page actually consists of complete instructions for 35mm cameras, and advice along the lines of "video and digital cameras probably won't work, but go ahead and try them."
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
It seems like every year since 1998 they've been predicting the best meteor shower ever. *jaded* Ah, it appears this will be the last one. Perhaps I will get up at 4AM again. I did it last year and it was really impressive -- even the view from our window was something.
Is there an insurance I can buy--or sue God for droppin' stones in my backyard !! I have when he/she/it does that !
Funny comment, although completely idiotic. The fireballs are commonly produced from peices not much larger than a grain of sand. Not exactly gonna do much to your car or backyard even if they did make it through the atmosphere.
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.
Once in a lifetime?
my fat arse
The leonids come through for 2-3 year recurrent periods every 31 years.
and some years they come through when you haven't got a full moon in the sky (unlike this lot).
that would be a lot closer to "once in a lifetime"
I wish the astromony nuts would stop over-inflating expectations.
the best meteor showers i've seen have been completely unexpected and un-announced.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
After seeing this, I'll be sure to park my car in the garage tonight!
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
Not all of us here are fat slobs, munching cheesy-poofs in front of the CRT! I spent the weekend with my Texas Army National Guard unit in the field. We're an infantry unit so there wasn't much sitting around the office. On Saturday night, I got a great view of meteor showers while I was doing a nighttime land navigation course. Speaking of meteors (and since that is our topic here), you're not out of luck if you don't make it out tonight or tomorrow. They've been falling in great numbers for the past few weeks.
Me, I think I'll spend the night in a windowless room and come out in the morning to a world full of people blinded by the mysterious alien rays, but I'll have to watch out for the Triffids roaming the landscape eating all and sundry.
;-)
Of course, if John Wyndham had written Day of the Triffids after the advent of the Internet, he'd have used geeks as his accidentally-sighted protagonists instead of a bandaged hospital patient. The hardcore geeks will probably be taking advantage of the bandwidth everyone else isn't using 'cause they're all outside skywatching, and will catch their meteors on the NASA site
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
-- Heisenberg might have slept here.
Is it me, or is every year the "last chance" for the "best ever." I feel like I'm buying a used car. Last year was great! But they said it wouldn't be good until 2099, or something. Here's the Slashdot Article, so yes go look, yes have a good time, but don't think this is the last time we'll see leonids in our life time.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
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.
At least we *know* it's going to be a dud this year. The moon is full and the radar shows those clouds you mention spread over a wide area. Last year I stayed up, and then fog rolled in half an hour before peak. The only people in NoVA who did well last year were the ones that drove out to Fauquier. 12:30 AM and I'm going to bed. I'll leave the blinds up though. If we have a *real* meteor storm, the clouds won't matter. I read accounts of one back in the 19th century where people woke out of a sound sleep. Frankly, I don't think I will ever do much better than the unusually strong Perseids of '93. I saw at least a dozen bright ones that left trails that year, and one that was so bright it cast a shadow and made a noise. I turned just in time to see it disappear.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not a dud, but hardly the stuff of legends. I was lucky to have two bright ones shortly after I started to watch -- these helped me locate the putative point of origin, even though, for the most part, I could see very few stars in that sector of the sky because of the lights of Manchester, NH. There I saw a lot of the little guys whose trails weren't much longer than a couple of times the moon's diameter.
Now I gotta read up on this stuff. Why is this stuff hanging around at just this point in the earth's orbit? Our planet has to hustle around the sun to keep from falling in...why haven't these little bits of comet debris fallen into the sun.
Is this visible from the land down under?
I've seen this a few times, actually. My last three trips to Indianapolis (I live in Oklahoma City), I've seen meteors either while flying to or from Indy. The first trip was a year ago, and I saw them between St. Louis and Terre Haute; the second was in September, and I saw them between St. Louis and Springfield, MO; the third was last weekend, and I saw them just as I was leaving Springfield, MO. It's absolutely amazing to see; on two different occasions, I've seen meteors, pulsing green, pass through my altitude. Truly stunning. Matter of fact, it inspired me to write a column about meteors. I'm not going flying tonight, but I am going to go watch the showers; I encourage everybody else to do so as well.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
For those who in clouds or daylight can tune their FM radio to some far FM channel(102+ MHz) where there is no FM radio signal. Whoosh whoosh sounds you will hear :)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Nope, Mass is clouded over/fogged over as well. :-(
I missed it last year because of my bitch ex-girlfriend, and this year cuz of weather. Oh well, I'll have to live until I'm 54 then.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
So enjoy!
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Up at 4:00 to see the show, and it's overcast. But when was the last time you found all the NASA TV streaming sites /.'ed at this hour?
There was a thick layer of fog last night. I'm most irritated.
Looks to me like someone estimation tool was proven wrong this year. Last year (2001) kicked this year's ass.
My personal data:
2000: 68 per hr
2001: 450 per hr
2002: 93 per hr
M@
Krispy Cream is people
http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/
He is in the group at the top. The pictures will likely be here.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Absolutely majestic. The meteor shower peaked around 4:50 local time, when I counted 55 in a 5-minute period. Some of the meteors happened simultaneously. I'm glad I set my alarm for 3:30 (although it took quite an act of willpower to get up)!!!
It was raining here in Ohio, so no visible sign of the Leonids. But I got up early and turned on my ham 6M and 2M rigs and heard lots of meteor-scatter activity.
Meteor trails ionize the atmosphere, making them reflective to radio waves. You can bounce signals off the trails, and there were bunches of folks doing that this morning, particularly on the 6M (50MHz) band, which is optimum for this sort of thing.
It's really interesting to listen to. You hear nothing, then all of a sudden the signal goes to S9 (ie, strong) and stays that way for anything from a couple of seconds to a minute or more. Then it fades away and you wait for the next burst.
I only had a low power transmitter, so listened a lot more than I talked, but I did work a station near Boston, MA who heard my 20 watts with no problems during a good burst. Better equipped stations were working from the east coast to well west of the Mississippi.
Random reinforcement is a terrible force. I set my alarm to get me up in time to see the predicted second wave and I'm glad I did.
Shortly before dawn, about 5:15 to 5:45, I spotted 52 more meteors. Full moon was fairly far down in the west but the city lights and rosy fingers of dawn were still there to contend with. I envy the people who could see colors!
Did anybody capture it?
Wasn't really as good as last year, but the sky was more clear, and on the West coast, the moon was pretty low in the sky by 2:30am.
What I saw were a few average ones, (not a lot of really bright fireballs, many trails, but no trains). And there was an odd pattern to them. We'd see 5-10 of them in the space of about 30 seconds, then nothing, absolutely nothing, for 5-10 minutes, then another little burst. That was pretty much it from 1:45 to 3am, the times I was out. I didn't have time to review my video footage, I assume it's going to suck. I used a Sony DCR-TRV20 with "nightshot" on. Got some good video of my kids oohing and ahhing, but nothing was showing up in the viewfinder at all. I think the key to meteor showers is a wide-angle lens. Or luck.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I drove up Mt. Hamilton, east of San Jose, CA, to an area that would have been pretty dark except that the full moon was blazingly bright. There was a bit of haze, which the moon lit up as well, so only the brighter stuff showed. I'd guess that between 2am-3am we saw maybe 50-100, though we weren't counting. A few were quite impressive, but it wasn't anything like last year's amazing show. I'm not sure how much of this was because of the number of meteors going by and how much was because the moonlight made all of the dim ones invisible, while last year was dark enough we could see far more of the meteors that went by and better details on the ones we saw.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A few years back, I was out in Colorado for the August meteors. One night I was out camping and got a good view of the early ones, and the main night of the shower I was floating in a hot spring outside of Steamboat. It's an idyllic and relaxing way to watch, and beats freezing the night away.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks