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(meteorobs) More from CA



A friend and I set out from the San Fransisco area on the evening of the
16th determined to find clear skies.  We headed south to get out from under
the storm that was moving through northern California.  We had considered
Mercy Hot Springs as one possible destination but found the vicinity cloudy
as we passed by.  I found it interesting after the fact to learn that
observers were stationed there as part of a coordinated effort with
observers at two other sites.  Apparently, we made the right choice to keep
driving down I-5.

Around 11:30 as the radiant was on the horizon I caught sight of a yellow
fireball paralleling the horizon and in the next half hour spotted three
more meteors from the moving car under hazy skies.  We stopped for about 10
minutes around 12:30am PST on HWY 41 under a fairly clear patch of sky but
saw nothing.  We saw clouds uncomfortably close to our north and continued
down the road.  We finally found a spot along an irrigation canal off of HWY
46 about 10 miles west of Lost Hills and made camp around 1:15am.  We made
no effort to keep a count or estimate brightnesses, but for the period we
watched until clouds moved in around 3:30am we felt we were easily each
seeing at least one meteor per minute.  The rate appeared reasonably
constant over that observing time.  We timed one train for over a minute and
many others lasted tens of seconds.  The one that got away, however, was one
that exploded over our heads shortly after the clouds moved in.  Through the
clouds the burst lit up the ground like lightening.  We were very
dissapointed that we didn't see it directly.  We broke camp around 3:45am
since the sky was easily 90% obscured and drove east towards Bakersfield to
try to get out from under it.  Ultimately, we ended up near Mojave just
minutes after moonrise as dawn was breaking.  Through the drive we continued
to see bright meteors through the clouds.  We found a spot off of the road
to continue observing as the sky brightened.  The thing that really
impressed me as we watched the last few meteors of the night was the way the
meteors appeared to be falling straight down out of the sky rather than
streaking across the sky.  I suppose this was because the radiant was pretty
high in the sky at that point.

Anyway, our highly unscientific and informal results suggest that the shower
was still quite strong in the 1am to 4am time frame on the West Coast of
North America and we estimate the rate was 60 to 100 per hour.

-Robert Hayden

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