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Re: (meteorobs) Perseid & Leonid clouds



Op Sat, 21 Aug 1999, exceld77 schreef:

> Several hours before the great Leonid storm, people saw a faint glow in the
> constellation of Leo. This was the light being scattered from the meteoroid
> cloud which later produced the storm.  Several days ago I read about a
> similar cloud seen before the Perseid outburst of 1992 ( the text actually
> say that the cloud was quite bright, between +3 and +4 magnitude!!).

Actually, this has been the Perseid outburst of 1993, not 1992, and I was 
one of the persons who observed it.

That observation is still very contentious. All that I can say, is that 
we (Casper ter Kuile, Koen Miskotte, Robert Haas and me) definitely noted a 
elongated glow, not unsimilar in appearance 
to a slightly more elongated and slightly brighter version of the 
'gegenschein', for about 10 minutes or so, just east of Algol in Perseus. 
We observed it from our temporary observing location at Rognes in Southern 
France; at the same time, Dutch meteorologist Jacob Kuiper noted a 
similar phenomenon in Perseus from the Vosges Mountains in France, 500 
km to the north.

I do not know what it has been; it might have been the 'meteoroid cloud' 
it might have been something else. Jacob Kuiper and we have been able to 
reject a large suite of normal meteorological and atmospherical 
phenomenon on good grounds (see our 1993 WGN report), so we favoured the 
'meteoroid cloud'. Criticism has been that theoretically, such a glow 
should have been in a different part of the sky. But then, that's theory. 
We noted it in Perseus. That's all I can say, and our team still has some 
bitter memories about some of the criticism leveld at us at the time -I 
again repeat that we definitely DID observe something.

- Marco Langbroek
  Dutch Meteor Society

Postscript; part of the doubts leveled arose from the mistaken idea that 
we reported 'our' glow at a similar sky location as given by Joe Rao in a 
paper before the Perseid event, in which he by mistake had given a wrong 
position. However, our location of the 'glow' we noted was some 20 
degrees different, east of Algol and not many degrees south. We did NOT 
report it at the erratic S&T position, contrary to the opinion of some.



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