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(meteorobs) Lyrids from Edmonton



    After a disconcerting length of time I was beginning to think this report would read "Lyrid from Edmonton". Not quite a complete waste of time, for reasons discussed below, but pretty slow going. So perhaps this is as good a place as any to enter the interesting "quality vs. quantity" debate that's been going down on meteorobs the last little while.
 
    Tonight after dragging my sorry butt out of bed around 3 a.m., I had to deal with intermittent cloud cover, moderate transparency, and worst of all, the loss of a decently dark site fairly close to home on the western outskirts of Edmonton. A row of new streetlights heralded the arrival of Civilization As We Know It. Can the end be far behind? So I headed further south and further west to a less satisfactory spot on the side of Winterburn Road (215 Street). There was enough cirrus up there to keep the limiting magnitude not much better than 5.0, and enough of the thicker stuff to render my counts scientifically useless. That said, having made the effort to get up, warmly dressed, and out there, I decided to wait it out. Not much else to do in Winterburn at 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning, I figured.
 
    In the end I saw 4 lousy meteors in 75 minutes. Except two of them weren't lousy at all, they were quite nice in fact, and tantalizing enough to make me, as always, thirst for more.  One was a bright streak towards the western horizon which formed one end of a direct line including Arcturus and Vega, the meteor being the brightest of the three by a magnitude or so. And the other would have made my evening all by itself if I had been looking right at it. I glimpsed the flash in my extreme peripheral vision, and caught the tail end of the rapidly fading train. The end point was just below the cloud deck, and I glimpsed a broken train that either was visible through the clouds, or the explosion point reflected off of them, I couldn't quite quantify that in the brief ~0.1 second afforded me. It was quite exceptionally bright, considerably more luminous than Jupiter which was very low in the west at this point. I would suspect -5 or even greater, considering the cloud situation. 
 
    To quote the opening sentence of an article I once wrote, meteor observing is like fishing, only easier. (Although I'm not a fisherman myself, as a proud native son of Newfoundland let's just say I know the type.) One merely needs to sit under an open sky and cast one's eyes in its direction. While many of my astronomer friends would rather spend their hours telescopically examining nature's more distant treasures, I frequently prefer the more holistic experience of naked-eye observing. There is something about the simplicity of the method that strongly appeals to my inner Luddite. A hand-held microcassette recorder and a digital watch's timer announcing the end of each 10-minute bin can be quite enough technology, thank you. Certainly it's more rewarding and interesting when the fish are jumping, the cotton is high, and the sky is alive with meteors. But even when one gets few bites, as tonight, one still gets that opportunity to reconnect, to have a quiet debate with nature by stopping to consider its myriad points (of light), and to reflect on one's own thoughts. As Bob L. and others eloquently pointed out, it's all in one's state of mind, and I choose to enjoy the process. Besides, you never know when you might land the Big One.
 
    For example, I've watched the Perseids on peak night every year for the last 15 and have never once been completely skunked, with my nightly counts ranging from 4 to 400. But perhaps the single most memorable Perseid, the Albireo Meteor, occurred on one of the slowest, least promising of those nights. I and one other hardy soul observed a bright meteor streak along the Cygnus Milky Way not that far from Albireo itself when it suddenly split into two components, a blue sapphire streak closely followed by an orange flash like a spark from a campfire. A double meteor, and a spectacularly coloured one at that. If my friend hadn't confirmed it, I would have been tempted to write it off as one of those "optical delusions" from which I occasionally suffer. But this was no mirage; I'm not sure what sort of chemistry was happening there, but I do know such experiences have cemented a special chemistry of a different type I have developed with one of the true loves of my life, the night sky.         
    Nothing quite that good tonight, unfortunately, but I got enough of a look between the clouds to reassure myself that Earth wasn't under attack and the Lyrids were, as always in my fairly limited experience, pretty light. But there were two pretty lights which made the evening worth my time and trouble. Once again, the Lyrids have delivered a subtle show to be ignored by the masses and savoured by the connoisseur. So, as always and regardless of counts, I wound up feeling glad I went, somehow more connected to both the planet I live on and the cosmos through which we both travel.   
 
    After the careful drive home, I stopped on the way into the house to listen to a movement from this morning's performance of the Avian Symphony. My heart soared ever higher as I picked out each new voice, eventually identifying 10 different sections. The only time I'm ever up at this wonderful time of day is when I've stayed up. And as you can see, I'm still up and inspired enough by a "mediocre" show to be writing this rather lengthy epistle at the ungodly, or at least unBrucely, hour of 7 a.m. I'm listening to the ongoing radio shower as I write, which also seems to be fairly low activity. I'll count 'em up later: from the sounds of things it won't take very long. Time for bed. 
 
    Happy Earth Day. regards, Bruce