(meteorobs) Sunday morning at Blackfoot -- meteors, satellites, NLC and other transient phenomena

BRUCE MCCURDY bmccurdy at shaw.ca
Mon Jul 30 01:10:33 EDT 2012


     With clear skies in the forecast and bright fireballs in the news (http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=28&month=07&year=2012) I headed out to Blackfoot early this (Sunday) morning. With the waxing gibbous moon setting just before 02:00 I wasn't surprised to find an empty parking lot. Between my arrival shortly after moonset and my departure shortly after sunrise I had quite an enjoyable, and varied, observing session, mostly with the naked eye supplemented by my 10x50s. A few highlights:

-- Observed meteors for the first hour-plus, counting a dozen streakers in all. My primary goal was to observe the South Delta Aquariid peak, especially interesting this year given the shower's association with Comet Machholz. This is usually a weak shower for those of us in the far north, and last night was no exception as I observed just three members, all of mag 3 or 4. I also caught four Perseids including a brilliant -2 that blazed across my direct vision minutes after I started to become my first Perseid of the season. I observed one suspected member from the recently identified Alpha Triangulid radiant, and four sporadics. Four of the twelve meteors I observed were in the low negative magnitudes, with some decent persistent trains.(IMO visual observation summary here: http://vmo.imo.net/imozhr/obsview/view.php?id=10327)

-- Saw a large number of satellites, including a pass of Spot 1 that was about 10x brighter than the predicted mag 3.9. Had a real nice Iridium flare at at 3:43 halfway up the SE sky, predicted to be -5 for Blackfoot and easily verifiable given the handy nearby "comparison stars" Venus and Jupiter. The flare did briefly exceed Venus to my eye. 

-- Had two excellent passes of ISS, with the second achieving a max altitude of 62° and shining midway in brightness between Venus and Jupiter, less than 20 minutes before sunrise. No sign during either pass of any supply ships fore and/or aft, as were apparently hanging around earlier in the week. 

-- Observed an excellent display of NLC, which I first noticed when I got out of my south-facing chair for the Iridium and ISS events around 3:45. The display had come up very fast, as confirmed in Mike Noble's animated image sequence which he brought down to the deck tonight. This display was fairly localized a little east of due north, but was quite dynamic. There was a seemingly-3D interaction between the NLC and bands of what appeared to be foreground tropospheric clouds that reminded me of the relationship of the Cygnus Star Cloud & Cygnus Rift which I had been admiring during my meteor-observing session. The whole works was backlit/toplit by a faint auroral arch which showed up much better on Mike's video than it did to the eye. There was also a lower, wider display hovering in the treetops in the WNW thatI couldn't see well.

-- Tracked Venus and Jupiter right into daylight hours, with Jupiter still faintly visible to the naked eye several minutes after sunrise. (Venus remained dead easy throughout) 

-- Heard three superb renditions of the Coyote Chorus, as well as the wake-up calls of a wide variety of birds. Felt closer to nature than I have in quite some time. Just the faint traffic hum from Highway 16 some 4 km to the north reminded me of the inevitable return to "civilization" that awaited. Reluctantly packed up and headed back into it around 6 a.m. 

     Bruce
     *****



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