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

[Robert Gardiner]

That meteor could have been a Lacertid. The readiant is near the meridian around midnight and is high in the sky. Many of them I have seen are early in the evening around midnight. The radiant is supposed to be bet Lacerta

-----Original Message-----
>From: Arlene Carol <arlene.carol at gmail.com>
>Sent: Aug 11, 2007 8:42 AM
>To: meteorobs <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
>Subject: (meteorobs) first 'real' attempt at 'doing it right'
>
>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
>---
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