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Re: (meteorobs) What I think I know (and don't know) ...
Quoting Rob McNaught <rmn@aaocbn.aaodot gov.AU>:
> And yes, were it not for Gary Kronk, we may not have known about
> 1869. This evidence really put the nail in the coffin as far as we were
> concerned. Again, this is all discussed in the original article. Marco
> analysed this data also I believe.
>
Yip, following Rob & David's WGN article which pointed to the 1869 Mauritius
observations, I looked up the particular Nature paper from 1869 they quoted and
then played a bit with the quoted observations. There is one account among the
several quoted by Meldrum which gives enough rate info to do some rough
calculations. Even with very (=too) "optimistic" assumptions regarding sky
quality etc., rates appear to have been at least 1000 in 1869 (and probably, it
was higher), with evidence suggesting that this was due to a rather sharp,
short duration peak. I wrote a small paper on it for Radiant, the Journal of
the DMS, which if correctly should be available as pdf through our DMS ftp
website (I am at my work now so I don't have the full reference available at
the moment). So it indeed appears that Leonid rates of 1000+ several years
after perihelion passage of the parent comet are possible, as Rob and David
already wrote. At any rate, long period comets like the (unknown) parent of the
alpha Monocerotids are capable of quite nice rates (ZHR ~600 for the 1995 alpha
Monocerotids) when the parent is presumably at very large distance of its
perihelion (especially relative to a Tempel-Tuttle like orbit). This indicates
that dense dust concentrations at distance of the comet are not something
unique to the Leonids.
- Marco
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