2009 Leonids

[MeteorWayne]

The news isn't good for the US for the most part. Of the 17 predicted enhanced periods, most (especially the highest rate ones) occur during the daytime or before the radiant rises in the evening for the US.
The first one comes up toward this early morning for the PST time zone, for the eastern US, it's after sunrise.

The prediction is one from Mikhail Maslov, who has been succesful the last few years. The peak time, with a ZHR of 15-20 (barely above the normal peak of 10-15) is based on particles ejected from Tempel Tuttle in 1767. The peak time would be 13:30 UTC, 08:30 EST, 05:30 PST. That will be at the best time for the Western US and Hawaii.

After this, there are a few minor US peaks Tuesday morning...after that, all the highest rate peaks are projected to occur during the daytime for the US.

Here is the International Meteor Orgnization's "On the Fly" ZHR graph:

Of course, as I always say, meteor showers are like a box o' chocolates...you never know what will happen unless you look. That's why I love the subject, because surprises can always happen.
http://www.arm.ac.uk/~gba/imo/leonids2009/

 

[MeteorWayne]

Well I got up at midnight. Of course it was cloudy So I watched TV, checking the sky every 15 minutes. At about 4 AM, it showed signs of clearing (just after War of the Worlds started on AMC ), so I packed up and headed to the NJAA. If was still ugly skies, they never did fully clear, but heck, you take what you can get; can't fight mother nature. It really wasn't too bad considering. I saw 16 meteors in 1.35 hours (11.9/hr), of which 12 were Leonids (8.9/hr), 3 sporadics, and one November Orionid (Not the same shower as the Orionids). Haven't crunched the numbers yet to determine ZHR, but it will probably be close to 20.

Meteor Wayne

 

[charolastra]

thanks for the information, Wayne. I live in New England, USA and I'm considering waking up around 3:30 am to see if I can catch any (I'll bring a big baseball glove - just in case). haven't made up my mind, though; will update if I go out and see any!

 

[ZenGalacticore]

Wayne- So, Monday morning you saw about 15 in an hour and a half on a partly cloudy early morning? Did I read that right? That's pretty good, IMO.

So what can I expect this morning, Tuesday, from 1230 am to 4:00 am EST? Isn't this when it peaks for North America, at night anyway? I'm in Georgia, as you probably know, and we have totally clear skies tonight.

 

[vividasday]

Here we are also waiting in the wee early morning to see... some sort of or many sort ofs' ....will there be any light'n?
Check in soon please

 

[vattas]

It was cloudy here in Lithuania. As usual for Leonids.

 

[andrew_t1000]

Gettin' ready to film the Leonids!

It's 1:30am and we got light fog/low cloud, as well as some high wispy cloud.

It might be ok though!
Fingers crossed!

It looks like Mars is near the radiant!

 

[MeteorWayne]

Hi folks, good morning. Sorry I didn't reply last light, but on nights where I plan on being meteor observing from midnight to dawn (like for the Leonids) I take a nap in the evening before them. It's one thing to just go out and watch, but since I am recording scientific data, I have to have as many brain cells functioning as possible

Of course, the best laid plans...I watched overcast skies from midnight till 5 AM, then gave up and went to sleep in hopes of getting out tonight.

Yeah, Zen, since I had lowered my expectations to reality, and the skies were not very clear, I thought it was a good morning. It's been a tough year...between the weather and bad moon timing near the major shower peaks, this was only my 8th observing session of the year...last year I had 52!

Yes Andrew, Mars is not far away at all, and Saturn (much dimmer) is below Leo's....ummm...hindquarters

 

[ZenGalacticore]

Wayne- Well, I tell ya, around about 12:30 am EST it began to cloud up, rather thickly and quickly. That's the way it goes. I was quite excited because of the new moon, but, as Carl Sagan once said, "The Universe is not required to be in harmony with human wants and desires." :shock:

Besides, I can't get all the bozos in N. Georgia and Atlanta to turn the lights off! :roll: :|

 

[andrew_t1000]

Well it's 4:30am, the cloud cover became total and the sun is coming up, but.....

From 2am I saw quite a few tiny flashes, then around a dozen short streaks.
Around 3am I saw 4 very long streaks that were bright enough to light up the clouds!
At 3:20am I saw one of the most spectacular meteors I have EVER seen!!
It was like a distress flare!
Even more amazing, in the last few moments before it totally vaporised in a very bright flash, it left a vapour trail directly over head! That lingered for 15 - 20 minutes!
I'm not sure if it was due to light pollution, starlight or what ever, but it looked incandescent, it was quite a bit brighter than the clouds.
It was amazing!
I'm not sure how my time lapse is going to turn out, but tomorrow night I will try a different tactic.
I've been messing around with CHDK on my Canon IXUS-75, instead of running the intervelometer script, I'll try running the motion detector script and see how that goes.

I have to say it was well worth sitting up all night!
I'm going to stitch these raw images together and see what I have.
I'll post it on YouTube and leave the link here regardless.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Of course I was clouded out on the peak morning here in NJ. I went out this morning and battled clouds all the time. I managed 2.2 hours of observing time in 3 1/2 total hours.

27 meteors (12.3/Hr), 15 Leonids (6.8/Hr), ZHR was probably a bit below 20.

Amazingly, this is my best year for the Leonids out of the last 4, with 27 total. Woo Hoo!!

The 2001 ouburst gave me almost 600 for the morning

My total for the year is finally over 300 meteors.

 

[MeteorWayne]

The first results are starting to come in from the areas that observed this year's outbursts.

The data is rather preliminary with only 1195 Leonids reported from 55 observers in 16 countries.

Still, the big picture shows peak ZHR of ~ 100.

The detailed look at the outburst shows a high somewhere over 125, a bit earlier than the predicted time...but like I say, there's a lot more data to come in. The peak graph on the IMO site uses about 50 meteors for each data point, so the exact timing and ZHR varies as more data is assimilated.

To look at the latest, see:

http://www.arm.ac.uk/~gba/imo/leonids2009/

 

[bdewoody]

This reply is related to a new thread I started. During these annual meteor showers does anybody monitor the moon to see if there are any significant strikes?

 

[andrew_t1000]

Wednesday night was great!
Between 12am and 2am I saw 18 meteors.
Between 2am and 4am I saw 48!

Nothing really big like tuesday morning, but still worth while.
I didn't manage to photograph any, but I made a nice timelapse of Mars rising.
I just read the SDC article about the fireball in Utah.
This sounds like the one I saw tuesday night.
For a moment there I was a "tad" concerned!
The groovy thing was when it flashed out directly overhead.
I've never seen a meteor leave a vapour trail before.

 

[MeteorWayne]

This reply is related to a new thread I started. During these annual meteor showers does anybody monitor the moon to see if there are any significant strikes?

Yes, there is a whole program dedicated to that effort. I'll see if I can find my links, and post it in the other thread.

 

[MeteorWayne]

My friend Pierre Martin, who drove from Ottawa to NJ for the Quadrantids way back at the start of the year, took these images of the Leonid Shower from just west of Ottawa on the morning of Nov 17th. He's good!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13845235@N ... 2/sizes/o/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/13845235@N ... 9/sizes/o/


Here's a few excerpts from his e-mail:

The Leonids remained remarkably consistent all the way until dawn.
When I signed "off" at 6am EST, I had bagged exactly 100 Leonids! (visually)

I took my time setting up my equatorial mount, cameras and
accessories, ensuring that everything worked. I shared my mount with
Ivo's camera, so we were running three Digital SLR's together, all
with wide angle lenses. Although dew was not an issue yet, I opted
not to take any chances, learning from past experience that dew/frost
will almost always appear at some point in the night. Our anti-dew
system was crude but cheap and effective... chemical hand warmers in a
sock, wrapped and taped around the lens. The warmers provides more
than enough heat to keep our lenses dry for several hours.