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(meteorobs) obs. LANMA May 6-7, 2000 (great night!)



(Message from Marco Langbroek via Casper ter Kuile)

Hi,

What a great night this was! We experienced a very dark night at 
Biddinghuizen, with Lm as deep as +6.8, and consequently saw  multitudes of 
meteors. This really was 'harvesting by numbers'! We continued for over an 
hour into (deep) twilight to catch the odd eta Aquarid and were quite 
succesfull: Koen got 2, and I got 4 possible eta Aquarids with the radiant 
just above the horizon.  That last is something of a record for our country 
as far as I know... Also, we got a very fine batch of eta Lyrids (possible 
IRAS-Araki-Alcock meteors), really surprising how well this stream showed 
up. Of course that was largely due to the very fine observing conditions. 
Sporadic rates were fine as well due to this, and sporadics and minor 
streams combined with the deep Lm thus made for an exciting 20 
meteors/hour. Not bad for a May night!  Below, a table with my data.

The Appel family (the owners of our observing ground) had come home from a 
short holliday, so we first spent some time having a social chat with them 
in their farmstead. It was some time ago we last had met them, so it was 
good to see and talk with them again for these are extremely kind people. 
Our converstations got that enjoyable that we lost control of time a bit 
and at a certain moment discovered that it already was past local midnight. 
So we said them goodbeye, left them a bottle of wine, and started 
observing. My session started at 22:25 UT (0:25 local time) and we ended at 
2:20 UT with our sheets and plotting charts richly filled with meteors. All 
in all, I observed 64 meteors in 3.33h effective this night, including the 
one hour session into deep twilight. Yes, not bad at all for a night in 
May...! I thoroughly enjoyed it and so did Koen.

No really bright meteors this night: a couple of +2 meteors were the best 
ones. We had a long slow  +3 possible alpha Bootid with a short wake at 
23:15 UT, below Lyra. Eta Lyrids (IAA) appeared at  raw rates of 5-6 hour, 
amazing. A nice milky way climbed higher and higher in the sky as the night 
proceeded.  Low at the southwest horizon, we could see the remnants of the 
cirrus sheet from the thunderstorms over Belgium and the southern North 
Sea, but  our skies were beautifully clear, and the temperatures were mild. 
At about 1:10 UT, both twilight set in and the eta Aquarid radiant rose. At 
1:31 UT I had my first candidate, a long fast +2 trail from the Crb-Her 
border to below Arcturus. A second possible eta Aquarid appeared at 1:38, a 
faint +5 trailing from southern Lacerta to the Dra-Cep border. A third 
appeared at 1:51, a +3 going from the center of the Cygnus cross to the 
head of Draco. The last possible candidate appeared at 2:00 UT, a +3 
trailing below Altair from Aql to Oph. At 2:20, the sky had become so 
bright that we quit. This was a very fine night!

Marco Langbroek
the Netherlands

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
----------
Date: May 6-7, 2000
loc.: Biddinghuizen (Netherlands), 52d 28'N, 5d 38' E
obs.: Marco Langbroek      -       LANMA

UT                  Teff    Lm     nLyr     mVir     aBoo     aSco     nAqr 
     Spo
2:25-23:30    0.97   6.8        6           0          1            1 
     -          13
3:30-00:40    0.82   6.8        5           1          0            0 
     -          10
0:40-01:20    0.58   6.8        0           1          0            0 
    0          14
1:20-02:20*   0.96   var        0           0         0             1 
    4           7
 
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