(meteorobs) perseids and the full moon

[Chris Peterson]

Your experience is different from mine. At my high altitude location, 
the sky is black 45° from the full Moon. If I'm out of direct moonlight, 
I can see stars magnitude 3 or even dimmer over most of the sky. My 
meteor camera, which is sensitive to mag 1, catches only a few more 
meteors in a moonless year than in one with a full Moon, and my eye 
still beats the camera.

Of course, technicalities aside, I think you might be confusing what 
"fun" is to a serious meteor watcher, and what "fun" is to a bunch of 
Boy Scouts on a camping trip! <g>

Chris

*******************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

On 7/3/2011 8:07 PM, dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de wrote:
>
> But it's no fun - and tiring to the eyes - to stare at the bright blue sky
> a full moon creates. In 2003 the Perseids coincided exactly with full
> moon, and I had - otherwise - perfect conditions in Turkey. Yet the
> moonlit sky was so unpleasant to monitor visually that I soon quit and
> rather had a video camera do the work. Which saw 42 meteors in one hour,
> quite a lot for an unintensified system. The rate I had seen visually was
> much lower. (IMO never calculated a ZHR for that year AFAIK, so the nice
> video data were useless for cross-calibration purposes in the end.)
>
> Then the 2000 Leonids peak was also strongly moonlit - and IMO analysts
> discovered that those who had clear skies and thus stared continuously had
> a significantly lower meteor perception that those who only encountered a
> hole in the clouds now and then. The lesson thus would be to hope for
> clouds (just kidding) or to rest your eyes frequently.
>
> Dan