[AZ-Observing] The Leonids from Vekol Road


My wife and I went out last night, and when we got to the Vekol Road site 
and the sky looked really poor.  There were a fairly large number of people 
there (around 20 cars or so at dusk) and people continued to show up all 
night.

We did a bit of normal observing (looking at the Andromeda Galaxy, the 
Dumbell Nebula, other pretty easy targets, as the sky was continually 
clouding over and clearing).  The joke became that, you'd identify a clear 
patch of sky, look down at the chart, start to move the scope and clouds 
would appear.

There was a substantial "party" atmosphere, and we did a fair amount of 
walking around and chatting (and looking through a neighbors new Celestron 
11" w/ GPS.   When the sky was clear this scope produced some really nice 
views that were noticeably brighter than our 8" dobs (as 
expected).  (<Homer>Ummmm, Celestron</Homer>).

Around 10:00 though, the sky was so bad that we packed up our telescope and 
camera and almost left.  At about that time, we saw an amazing meteor that 
streaked across the sky high to the south and probably spanned 100 degrees 
of the sky, it changed color and brightened and dimmed the entire way 
across the sky.  It really charged up the crowd and produced a number of 
"wows", cheering and clapping.

We decided to stay and napped a bit and started watching the sky again 
around 12:30 AM, and the clouds cleared substantially, and the show was 
just amazing.  It really started to pick up after 1:00 AM, and just 
continued to get more intense.  This was the first meteor shower of this 
magnitude I've seen, and it really put the lie to commercial fireworks.  At 
times there were two and three simultaneous meteors, sometimes there were 5 
or 6 in a second, and they were happening just about everywhere we 
looked.  It was really cool to know that there still exist things that can 
cause people to emit unsolicited shouts of joy.  Definitely a night to 
remember, even if it was really cold.  I think the two neatest events were 
1) when two meteors simultaneously seemed to originate from Leo's sickle, 
one heading north and one heading south and 2) when two meteors raced 
across the zenith, one on either side of Jupiter.  Just spectacular.

We wrapped it up just after 4:00, and headed home very happy that we waited 
out the clouds, and that such a super display was provided.

JC


Jim Cassidy                                     C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
JimCassidy@xxxxxxxx

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