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(meteorobs) Orionid observation October 19/20
Hi!
Last night, despite the bad weather forecast and weather conditions,
Jure Z., Dunja Fabjan and I drove to Jezerski vrh in hopes of clear skies.
Dunja had traveled 400 km just to observe this night so we had to give it
a try, no matter the forecast. We hit the cloud deck at 600m and reached
the top of the cloud cover at around 1300m (01:30 LT). We were greeted by
superb skies: LM 7.5, the sky was very dark right down to the horizon
(since the *entire* country was under the low cloud layer, plus much of
southern Austria). But the excellent sky was unfortunately soon wiped out
by fog.
With nothing to do we sat in the car an listened to the radio. The sky
suddenly cleared at 3:45 local. Since there was still some haze left, LM
didn't reach as deep as before, but at 7.1 wasn't bad at all. The sky was
still dark right down to the horizons. Occasional clouds were visible only
as dark voids in the starry background, even near the horizon. Zodiacal
light reached 80 degrees up, almost to the zenith, while Gegenschein was
visible as a faint 10x10 degree patch of diffuse light in Aries. M33 was
visible with direct vision.
Meteor activity was high. There were many, mostly faint sporadics.
The best sporadics were a -1m orange meteor in Leo with a 3 second train
and a -1m green slow fragmenting sporadic in Eridanus. The highlight of
the observing session was a swift yellow -3m Orionid fireball at 03:07:26
UT (05:07:26 local). Taurid activity was low.
THE SUMMARY:
Location: Pesnik
Lat: 46.518 N Long: 15.256 E Elev: 1400m
Period UT F LM teff ORI EGE TAU Spor
01:43-02:44 1.07 6.83 0.94 8 0 2 15
03:00-03:31 1.00 7.10 0.52 10 1 1 23
Magnitude distribution:
ORI: -3(1) -1(2) 0(2) +1(2) +2(2) +3(3) +4(1) +5(3) +6(2)
TAU: +2(1) +4(2)
Spor: -1(3) 0(2) +1(2) +2(4) +3(9) +4(11) +5(5) +6(2)
Bortle Class estimate: Class 2 (Typical Truly Dark Site)
Clear skies!
Jure A.
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