(meteorobs) Late Perseids, green fireball, & Nova Delphini

Bruce McCurdy bmccurdy at shaw.ca
Fri Aug 16 05:30:00 EDT 2013


After my last report on Aug 13 it cleared nicely that evening so I couldn't
resist going out for one last Perseid stint. I stuck a little closer to
home, and sacrificed a few tenths, but still had LM around 5.6, and a nice
view of the Cygnus star cloud, where I directed my gaze since the big city
glow was in the general direction of the radiant from that spot. Saw 25
Perseids in 2 hours, so well worth my time. Highlight by far was a
non-Perseid, a brilliant green fireball low in the SE which had a couple of
flashpoints that I adjudged to be in the range of -6 to -8. Well outside of
my usual negative-magnitude scale of "Sirius, Jupiter, ISS, Venus" and
somewhere in the high-end Iridium range. Best meteor I've seen in some
years, likely since the Buzzard Coulee fireball that dropped actual
meteorites a couple hundred km away in late 2008. 

 

It occurs to me now that I would have been looking in the general direction
of Nova Delphini 2013, now of naked-eye brightness but at that point just on
the rise. It also occurs to me that some members of this list might have
been pointing not just their eyes but their cameras towards the summer Milky
Way, and if so you might be well advised to search your images for evidence
of the rising nova. 

 

Bruce

*****

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