(meteorobs) Perseid narrative account

[Marco Langbroek]

Hello folks,

We had a beautifull Perseid 11-12 August night here, that we will long
remember. At first we were affraid to loose the night as it seemed a front
would pass over right this night. But it didn't, at least not for several
hours after midnight. We saw the pre-frontal cirrus coming in south of us,
but most of it dissolved before it was over us. I counted an Lm varying
between +6.5 and +6.8, with a few short breaks in observations because of
patches of clouds drifting over, but mostly we got it clear. We observed
from our dark location in Biddinghuizen, in the central polders of the
Netherlands.

And what a show it was! In about 3.5 hours of effective observing between
20:33 and 00:30 UTC (then we quit as heavier clouds moved in, and my
observing mate Robert had to work to day) I observed 223 meteors of which
182 were Perseids.

This night was memorable for the really unusual number of bright Perseids,
especially in the magnitude zero to -3 range. I can absolutely say this was
unusual for an August 11-12 night. It suggests that something unusual was
going on, even though I cannot make out any presence of the predicted 20:54
UTC peak of 1862 dust in my data (but we still had twilight then, as this
was near the start of our local night). Anyway, this was one of the best
Perseid shows I've seen in years (have to get back to 1993 to surpass it).
So we feel very very happy to have seen it!

We had a reporter from one of the major Dutch newspapers with us in the
field. Today the frontpage of the "Volkskrant" opened with a large picture
of our team member Robert Haas setting up his camera equipment in twilight.
Next saturday, the newspaper will have a background article on our
activities in the science pages. Robert is now busy developing films and
scanning the tapes of the image intensified meteor viideo camera.

- Marco

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Dr Marco Langbroek
Leiden, the Netherlands
52.15896 N, 4.48884 E (WGS 84)

e-mail: meteorites at dmsweb.org
website: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek
weblog: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/iss_log.html
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