(meteorobs) first 'real' attempt at 'doing it right'

[Arlene Carol]

Well, when I last wrote yesterday evening, I was headed outside to try my
hand at
'real' meteor watching and recording.

HA!! what a farce that was!!

First of all, I had to deal with a new problem...my GURKY neighbor (that's
an intentional
misspelling). He's a transplanted German-Turk who bought the property across
the
lane from me and has been the bane of my existence since then! He doesn't
seem to
realize he's in a village where folks go to bed when the sun goes down...At
11:30pm
he had his new bright lights on outside his garden gate. It was difficult
for me to get a
good position away from the glare.  i settled down to 'star-gaze' and saw a
short
meteor from almost directly overhead. i don' t think it was a perseid but
someone
will have to tell me which of the several radiant possibilities it could
possibly have been
from...actually, i saw two from almost the same location...straight
overhead, moving
from north to south. but after that, i didn't see anymore meteors because i
was so
busy trying to figure out magnitude!! Bob and Wayne, you were very helpful
but you also
gave me too many choices first time out...so for now, i'm only going to deal
with Polaris,
Vega and Jupiter because they are easy to locate and i'm not a fast
learner!!

i have a question though. i want to know who dreamed up these magnitudes?
and why on earth is something that's BRIGHTER than the zero number object
given
a negative number??? it's just not logical to me. I'd think that if
something were brighter
than Vega, it should be a PLUS!

maybe this is just the way a female brain works, but i find it very
confusing.

this might not be the best time for you smart people to try to educate me on
this because
it seems we're in a very active phase of meteor watching...so if you can't
spare the time,
that's okay. we'll talk about this when things get slow...

oh, by the way...i was only outside for about an hour, saw the two meteors i
mentioned and
a possible perseid....local time 11:38pm till just after midnight. then i
was out again after
5am but at that point, although i could clearly see the Pleiades, much of
the sky was slightly
clouded over...a very very unusual phenomenon in this part of the world at
this point in the year...
it's now after 6:30pm local time and we seem to have a cleaner sky.

i'm sort of torn between hoping and wishing for rain while at the same time
hoping it will wait
until after the Perseids peak in three days. We're desperate for water as
you may have heard.

well, clear skies to you all. i'm going to plan to get up at about 4am,
unless some one here
tells me differently....hope we're all successful tonight and tomorrow....

enjoy.

arlene