I got back a little while ago from a dark-sky viewing location along the Foothills Parkway, about an hour from our apartment, where I spent roughly 4 1/2 hours stargazing, chatting with fellow astronomy nerds, and watching for Perseids. I saw 136 meteors in all (135 at the lookout, 1 during the car ride home). Of those, there were maybe a dozen really spectacular meteors, including two bolides. Also, at least a dozen of the meteors I saw weren’t actually Perseids — they were either Delta Aquarids or random stray meteors. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable night of meteor-gazing. They came in bursts and lulls, but I’d say the average was at least one per minute during the last 30-45 minutes I was there. (I left around 4:00 AM.)
I didn’t get any really good meteor pictures, but I did manage one photo of a meteor’s trail. Also, I got two shots of… well, I’m not sure what they show, exactly. See for yourself here and here. They look kinda like nebulas, but they’re obviously much too big for that, and they only show up in a single picture before disappearing. I assume they’re somehow meteor-related.
Many more, better meteor photos can be found at SpaceWeather.com.
Not meteor-related, but still cool, is this picture of the Pleiades and Mars:
Anyway, I should get to bed, so I can at least catch a couple hours of sleep before Becky’s ultrasound at 10:00 AM. G’nite! (Er, G’morning!)
August 13th, 2007 at 9:20:30 am
The meteor train in your photo seems to have a significant bend. I wonder if that might be due to upper atmospheric wind sheer? If so, perhaps if a train remained visible for a long time, it might get twisted into a more rounded shape? I’ve never seen anything like that before, so it’s just a wild guess.
Just running with the idea of a long-lived train … at one point, I was helping out on a project that was studying a minor August meteor shower. There was activity from another minor shower (not the one we were studying) that produced slow meteors, often silver, with extremely long-lasting trains, from a radiant in Eridanus. I couldn’t find anything about this shower on Google, and was told at the time that it was obscure because the rates were so low. But the unusual trains gave these meteors a signature even more distinctive than hypervelocity for the Leonids. Even if I only saw one of these slow-moving long-train meteors every few days, I could tell they were related. When I speculate about a long-train August meteor, that’s the shower that comes to mind.
I was clouded out last night, but the previous night I saw about 30 meteors. The Delta Aquarids were really active, I’d venture a guess that 1/3 or 1/4 of the meteors I saw were from that shower. Here’s my photo of a Perseid meteor with the Pleiades, Mars and Hyades from Sunday morning.