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(meteorobs) Geminid meteor shower from Edmonton

    In the end the nightmare did me a favour. I woke from a fitful sleep
just before 6 a.m. MST, having finally crashed at 2 or so after a second
consecutive evening of disappointing clouds. The previous night I had stayed
up very late, listening to the Geminids on the Northern Claw (the radio
observatory in my basement), and spent another hour or so doing the same
last night, so I figured once I crashed that would be it. I had seen one
lousy meteor (not even a nice one) in a sucker hole around midnight, and
that was my sum total of visual Geminids for 2003. Yet another shower
skunked by clouds, which makes it all the majors since the Quadrantids way
back in early January.

    But here I was, groggy but awake, certainly not anxious to return to
that particular sleep, and when I looked out the bathroom window, it was
clear! So I snapped myself awake, threw on a few layers and settled in on my
back deck for awhile. No point going for a darker site at this point, I
would take what I could get. I could just see the three stars in the Little
Dipper that make the near-perfect arc between Polaris and Kochab, which are
all at 4.2 or 4.3, and I would place the limiting magnitude right there,
which is typical for my backyard near downtown Edmonton. For most of the
time I faced west towards the radiant -- the Geminids are one of the few
showers where the radiant ever gets significantly west as it transits the
meridian relatively early, around 2:30 local time. In addition to the
radiant, Gemini hosts Saturn just now. Always on the lookout for temporary
asterisms, I noted that Saturn with Capella and Aldebaran makes a second
Winter Triangle which is slightly larger and perhaps even more nearly
perfectly equilateral than the original (Procyon, Sirius, Betelgeuse).

    Meteor observing got off to a quick start as wham! ........ wham! ..
wham! I saw three in maybe 10 seconds all heading roughly southeast fairly
near the radiant. I was already happy I had gotten up. From then on activity
was much more pedestrian, and clouds once again started to roll in from the
west causing me to turn my chair around after 30 minutes and to go inside in
another 10. But in that time I saw 7 Geminids, a reasonably acceptable total
given the circumstances. Brightest ripped between Arcturus and Spica and was
far brighter than both, very close to Jupiter. Little in the way of trains,
what I saw were primarily moving points, rather than streaks, of light; in
my terminology more fly balls than line drives.

    As the clouds moved in I came downstairs for more live monitoring of the
radio shower, which has been quite active in recent days. Hit rates have
quite consistently been 1 to 2 per minute as recorded by Radio Sky Pipe, and
I found that listening live I could make out a significant number where
there was a discernible change from static to signal but no appreciable
change in volume, which went undetected by SkyPipe. So my counts will be
low... I guess it doesn't matter as long as I'm consistent in how I
interpret the SkyPipe data. I hope to conduct a detailed count of my
results, and those of several schools of the Sky Scan Array whose detectors
have been activated for the Geminids, and will report further as
developments warrant.

    After 20 minutes it cleared again, and at 7:05 I trundled out for a
further half hour in brightening skies. Two more Geminids including a -1
streaker heading near the zenith, followed seconds later by a "fuzzy" flash
heading almost the exact opposite direction, from the bowl of the Big Dipper
towards Gemini. I thought perhaps it was my very first Ursid -- who
scheduled a meteor shower to peak on December 23 anyways? --  but I
double-checked and the radiant wasn't quite right. So call it a sporadic, my
tenth and last meteor of the all-too-brief session. But one well worth the
effort, an hour under the open sky always does me good. Now it's back to bed
for what I hope will be happier dreams.

    regards, Bruce

    PS:  Usually the packets of information contained in radio bursts are
insignificant, the content of the broadcast far less important than the fact
I can hear it; whether it's a song or a commercial, country or classical, it
doesn't really matter, it's a meteor. But while I was writing this I heard
another overdense burst on the radio, clearly containing the words
"..dot captured Saddam Hussein..." so I turned on the tube and it was so. Am I
the only person in the world who heard this news live via Geminid?


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