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(meteorobs) What a night...
This really must have been the most ridiculous and exciting night in my whole career. We (5 observers) were again at our favourite spot - Mariborska Koca.
But the weather looked horrible. We were clouded out, rained out and ****** out the previous night, so we were already polishing our guns just in case this night would be the same.
There were some holes in the sky during the day, but at 20:00 local it looked hopeless. But, at 22:00 it started to clear and by 00:00 the sky was clear and the LM went down to +6.6 to +6.7. Perseids were numerous, but primarily faint, most between +2 and +5 mag. We experienced several surges of activity up to several meteors in less than 5 seconds.
We took a break at 1:50, just to return and see that some crazy lunatic turned on a HUUUUGE floodlight... ...I estimated it at -14 mag... :)
We packed our equipment and drove to another site, some 10 km away, which actually proved even darker. LM got down to +6.8 to +6.9 and Perseids rates were overwhelming at some points. The highligh were 5 PER in ONE second, all between 0 and +5 mag. There were several occasions with up to 3 PER's in less than 3 seconds. We also saw two parallel simultaneous PER's twice.
The best of the night were two -2.5 PER's with 5 and 19 second trains. We didn't see any fireballs tough... :( We haven't done any data examinations, but
my guess is that the rates reached nearly 100/hour (combined PER, SPO, CAP and AQU).
We finished at 4:30, all soaking wet from heavy dew and nearly frozen, since the temperatures were VERY low, probably near 0 C (even below??).
It was a superb night...
Clear Skies!
Jure A. & MBK Team
P.S. - we're still looking for that lunatic... ...my bet is he already moved out of the country...
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