Great report Bruce, we had terrible storms
all night and never even got an
opening in the clouds. Disappointed from
Tulsa, but there
will be other nights.
From: Bruce McCurdy
[mailto:bmccurdy@telusplanetdot net]
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004
8:42 AM
To: meteorobs@atmob.org
Cc: astro; RASCals Discussion
List; adminss@yahoogroups.com
Subject: (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