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(meteorobs) Fwd for Pierre Martin - Florida Leonids!
Greetings all,
Am forwarding this for Pierre... who is still wandering around Louisiana!
We haven't convinced him to come back to the snowy north yet. I expect he
will keep busy on the road trip back north - typing up his 672 meteors on
Michael's laptop as they drive.........
- Cathy Hall
near Ottawa, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------
Hello all,
A quick report from our motel near New Orleans, Louisiana...
A friend from Ottawa, Michael Vasseur travelled to and successfully observed
the Leonids on November 18/19 from a nice quiet site at a remote St-George
Island State Park in northern Florida. A long narrow island on the gulf of
Mexico. Beautiful!
Anyhoo... the Leonids.. We were setup in the white sand dunes, and we used
the
dunes to try and create walls to block the Moon. The first thing that
struck
me was how much the sky is different from 29 degrees latitude. Ursa Major
goes
below the horizon, and Orion is really high!! Despite a predicted 4/4
transparency, there was just a bit of haze/humidity from the sea that caused
a
wash-out sky early in the evening. The Moon and stars were very steady but I
had trouble seeing any of the stars of the little dipper's handle. Good
thing
the humidity fell, the sky got a lot better in the second half of the night
when it reached mag 5.3 despite the Full Moon. The only other slight problem
was thin cirrus clouds that arrived at 5:45am EST.
After we got all camera and observing gear setup, I signed-on and began
hunting for earthgrazers. The radiant at our spot rose at midnight EST, so
this left me with not much hope of seeing much activity from the first peak.
However, starting only a few minutes after radiant-rise, we enjoyed a few
nice
earthgrazers. One of them crossing over 90 degrees of the sky. We had all 4
SLR cameras (3 guided and 1 unguided) running for about one hour. We may
have
caught a few of these long paths!
For the next few hours, the Leonids were not all that impressive. Michael
went
for a nap while I stayed at it and kept counting. Until 5am EST, I'd say the
Leonids were only about comparable to a normal Perseids shower with a meteor
appearing after every few minutes or so. A few bright green and blue
meteors.
The first signs of the second dust trail encounter became obvious near 5am
EST. Now I was starting to see a few meteors every minute. Near 5:30am EST,
the rates suddenly skyrocketed to about a dozen Leonids every minute despite
the Moon! Some moments of relative inactivity would soon be followed by a
rapid bursts of Leonids all going different directions! WOW!!! Also, because
my field of view was facing toward Leo I saw quite a few foreshortened
Leonids
appearing like brief flashes right beside the radiant. According to my
notes,
the peak seems to have arrived at 5:40-45am (when I counted 22 Leonids in a
single minute). There also seemed to be a secondary peak at about 5:33am
(nearly the same counts). As soon as we approached 6am, the rates went down
very sharply. A beautiful sunrise over the water to finish off, and a bright
daylight Leonid!
This year's Leonids reminded me a bit more of the 1999 storm than last
year's
performance over North America... they were mostly faint meteors and had
only
a few bright ones poking through. The brightest ones included an exploding
mag -6 (that was photographed!!), and a pair of mag -4 fireballs. This
display
also had some very vividly colored BLUE and GREEN Leonids!! Although not as
dramatic as last year, the peak time still had my heart racing trying to
keep
up estimating every meteor's magnitude. A shortwave radio with the time
signal
was really helpful. I recorded a grand total of 672 meteors. More detailed
report and mag distribution to follow.
Clear skies to all,
Pierre Martin
Ottawa, Ontario (currently in Louisiana)
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