ASTRO EVENTS ARCHIVE 2001
SAS Christmas Party
2001
LEONID METEOR STORM
12:30am - 4:00am Monday morning 19th November 2001
from the constellation of Leo in the North-East - naked eye and binoculars.
Some comments from those lucky enough to seen the Leonids this year:
Ikufumi Makino:
Though image processing is not completed, I put
some photos of Leonid meteor shower on 19th Nov. 2001 observed in Nagano Pref..
Japan
Brendon
Downs:
There
were storms to the east of them,
there were storms to west of them,
there were storms to north of them,
there were storms to the south of them,
damn the storms.
From 20kms north of Miles, at Possum Park at 2:20am
on Monday morning it was raining, lightning, and thundering. At 2:30am the alarms
went off to start observing At 2:31am the alarms were reset to 3:00am due to clouds.
At 2:35am two stars were spotted, cloud 98%. At 2:57am 1st leonid was spotted.
Around 3:30am I was standing under an umbrella with my camera and tripod looking
very pathetic. Most of the time between 3:00am and 4:00 the sky varied between
95% and 50% cloud cover, with dawn the around 4:30am the sky was almost totally
clear. Between 3:00am and 4:30am I counted around 180 metors. There were probably
at least another 20 to 30 seen by others in the group, but not by me. Can only
imagine what the count could have been, if the sky was totally clear.
Tony and Anne-Louise:
Brendan does not speak with forked tongue... While Brendan, Kim and Grace stayed at Possum Park, Erwin, Anne-Louise and I drove 10 km south, found a clearing with good horizon on a side road, faced the west (I put my Mir training in to good use) at 3:10 to watch a sucker hole open up... I don't know how many we saw through the holes that developed and disappeared until dawn. Most spectacular was looking toward the radiant and seeing it clearly defined by meteors streaming in all directions!! Erwin estimated that the peak occurred between 3:55 and 4:05, with 4000 ZHR. At one stage 60/minute. The yelling from the three of us as we watched meteors fall from all parts of the sky. Most meteors were between mag 2 to -2 with a sprinkling of up to -5. At 4:20 (sky quite bright) Erwin counted 9 meteors in a minute limiting magnitude 2, later Anne-Louise saw one towards the east, but could not see Jupiter!! (limiting magnitude -2?)... Wow... Can we do it again ?? Photos... hmmm. We have to cool our heals until Thursday morning to see if we got anything on the B&W. An old colour film (Kodak 400 Gold III... circa 1995) I found showed us that the all sky camera (read truck hub cap) is a useful tool, and the 1600 film might be more sensitive... Is it ready yet, is it ready yet? Enough of this, read all about the Great Lion Hunt in the BAS Newsletter... Yes Darryl it is half done, but now I'm going to get some sleep, perhaps a chance to dream...
Roy Duncan
I headed to a friend's house in Parkinson at around 1am. Considering the rain I drove through, I really didn't think we'd see anything. But, the skies did clear - first to the northwest, at approximately 2am. Within several minutes, we'd already seen three meteors in this "gap", which extended to no more than 30 degrees altitude. A hopeful sign! Over the next ~15 minutes, the sky rapidly cleared, leaving perhaps 5 per cent cloud cover. During this (all-too-brief) time the meteors were quite spectacular, with a high proportion of bright events. Cloud again moved in, with a coverage of maybe 50 - 60 per cent. Bright events were still clearly visible through the gaps, leaving trails which persisted for several seconds, but the fainter meteors were lost. A little before 3am, higher cloud moved in from the west, cutting off the view completely until the end of the night. Over the whole hour, we counted between 100 - 150 meteors (we weren't keeping exact counts). Interestingly, the meteor rate we observed was quite inhomogeneous. At times there were several meteors within a couple of seconds, and several periods (each several minutes in length) where we sighted no events. The fun was added to by rudimentary radio observations of the Leonids. We had an old car radio cranked up and tuned to FM 88.3, and an appropriate antenna aimed vaguely southwest. Most of the time we heard only static, but when a meteor hit the right spot we'd hear a burst of classical music from the transmitter (an ABC station almost 1000 km away). The frequency of such classical music "bursts" was generally correlated with the meteor activity we observed visually (as expected), but we didn't collect any quantitative data. We had planned to digitise the radio signal onto an old PC, but ran out of time to get this working on the night. The most intense bursts of ABC FM occurred when we couldn't observe visually (from 3am through to maybe 5am). We even heard a large fraction of the news bulletin at 3am via meteor! Why can't the Leonids do this every year, dammit!!
Michael Horn
This report comes to you from our camp in the scrub near Cloncurry. On Sunday Barbara and I caught up with Rob McNaught and Gordon Garrardd to observe the Leonids from a dry lake 60 km north of Barkly Station Roadhouse NT (which is 187 km east of Tennant Creek). This location was decided on the day before as the best prospect for both weather and viewing. The first Leonids I saw was at around 1:30am (Queensland time) before the radiant was above the horizon. This was when I got out of bed to view them. At that time there was about one every one to two minutes. By 3am the rates were about two or three per second and continued to increase to a peak at around 4am. The meteor storm continued thought to astronomical twilight a about 4:45am. Even after nautical twilight with the sky orange to the east and blue over the remainder, we could still see the odd fireball streak across the sky. The majority of the meteors where quite bright ranging between mag 3 and -3 with plenty of even brighter fireballs to keep us all ooing and arring all morning. I also noticed quite a few flashes around the horizons. I assume these were caused by fireballs exploding below the horizon. I did not count the meteors, so the rates and times above are not precise. It's a bit hard to keep a reasonably accurate count while operating 4 cameras at the same time so I didn't bother counting. But hopefully I should have a few meteors recorded on film.
Colin Drescher, Gary Gawronski and Diane Hughes
From Mt Isa.
A Leonid storm!! We observed the leonids on both the Sunday and Monday (storm)
mornings under clear skies, 90km SSW of Mt Isa. A wonderful, wonderful meteor
storm was observed on Monday (see my report below). The skies were clear with
some haze. Temp was 33d C at 11pm dropping to 26d by morning twilight with the
hot! wind very gusty at times. Gary had to put his CCD onto the heavier tripod
for his all-sky camera images. Just to windy for his other setup. Hopefully he
has some excellent pics to show. No time to check the numerous images yet. I recorded
1,545 Leonids in the period from 1:30am to 4:40am (twilight at 4:31) with many
more seen into twilight. Greatest number of leonids in 1 min was 29 at 4:17am.
That was just in my ~100 degree field centred high in the north. The show started
with a 0 mag earth grazer that travelled up to 70d across the sky. Most were about
3rd mag with a few brigher than -6 mag leaving trains that lasted up to 20 mins
or more.
2001 Leonid Real-time Observation Archive
Understanding the Leonid Meteor Storms
