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(meteorobs) FW: Leonids from SoCal mountains
Please note: "Matson, Robert" <matsonr@saic.com> is
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------------- Attached Message -------------
From: "Matson, Robert" <matsonr@saic.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 20:06:09 -0800
To: "'Bolide_Chasers@yahoogroups.com'"
<Bolide_Chasers@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [Bolide_Chasers] Leonids from SoCal mountains
Hi All,
Just got back from Lake Arrowhead, CA about an hour
ago, and have been working my way through all the
Leonid posts. The Readers Digest version:
we had a great show! Not quite as good as last year,
but I blame the moon for that. The air was very dry,
and at 7000 feet you're above much of the haze, so
while the Moon did cut the limiting magnitude to
something like +5.5, it was darker than I expected.
Went out to look for earthgrazers at about 11:45pm
PST. Within a couple minutes I was rewarded with a
nice long, lazy, green Leonid that left a brief train.
Didn't see any others in the 15 minutes I was
looking.
Settled into the sleeping bags at 1:30am, positioning
ourselves by a wall that did a great job of blocking
the Moon. The rate was pretty low at this point --
perhaps 1 a minute.
Things started to pick up noticeably around 2:15am,
and by 2:30 the skies were quite busy, with meteors
often appearing in doubles, triples and quads. My
meteor count quickly ratched through 100, 150, 200 and
I was expecting things to start to slow down as we
passed the 2:30 predicted peak, but it didn't. It
continued to intensify with the actual peak around
2:45. For five minutes around that time, the rate was
a good 20 per minute. A surprisingly large number of
near point meteors, and at one point I really got the
"hyperdrive" effect with 6 simultaneous meteors
eminating from the radiant in a starburst pattern!
The falloff was not symmetric with the rise -- it was
VERY abrupt. By 3:15, the rates were lower than what
we were seeing at 1:30, and at 3:30 we called it a
night with a Leonid occurring only once every few
minutes.
I estimate our peak rate was 1200/hour for a five
minute window centered on 2:45am. We were only
looking at half the sky (the wall blocking the half
with the Moon in it), so the actual full-sky rate
would have been 2400/hour. Definitely storm-level for
a brief period. I can only imagine what it would have
been like without a full Moon interfering.
Best,
Rob
------------ End of Attached Message ------------
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