The Clear Sky Clock showed all blue for Thursday night only. The Satellite Infrared showed the monsoon flow turning east and missing the Salt Lake area. So I went out to the west desert at Lakeside to catch the Perseid shower. The radiant came right out of the double cluster and there were lots of bright ones that started 60 degrees from the radiant and stretched almost to the south horizon with a frequency was about one per minute. There were also a lot of very dim short ones in close to the radiant. Moonset wasnÂt until 11:30pm so I spent the early evening on double stars and bright planetary nebula. Venus and Jupiter were too low to show much more than mush. Starting at moonset, I made a tour of the Milky Way from Scorpius all the way around to Perseus. Left a 2:00 am before Mars rose high enough to show any detail. Glad I went out. DT --------------------------------- Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
- daniel turner <outwest112@yahoo.com> wrote:
So I went out to the west desert at Lakeside to catch the Perseid shower. The radiant came right out of the double cluster and there were lots of bright ones that started 60 degrees from the radiant and stretched almost to the south horizon with a frequency was about one per minute.
Daniel, what were the overnight temps? Not being up for the drive to a true dark site, I went up to Little Mtn. Pass. It was the usual general public zoo of cars with lights on, but the seeing was good for an LRP site. Like Daniel, the shower was pretty much as advertised and as seen in prior years. The bollides and streamers all came right off the predicted radiant. I charted about 30 meteors between 2:30 and 3:00am at about the 60p/h rate. There was a short-spike of to 120p/h (2 per min) between 3:15-3:30pm. The rate stayed steady between 45-60p/h until astronomical twilight started around 5:00am. A young guy, Nick, who works the sales counter at Clark Planetarium on Sundays, showed up. With small group of 4, we had a very enjoyable evening. I ended up with a stop in high avenues to watch the ISS pass overhead at 5:52am. Saturday and Sunday morning's ISS overflights are: Saturday 13 August 2005 4h43m45s ISS Transit 4h43m45s --.-m az:323.5d NW h:85.2d Appears 4h44m00s -1.7m az: 38.6d NE h:71.9d Disappears 4h48m44s 5.3m az: 53.7d NE Partial good zenithal track on star chart Nautical twilight: 5:29am Sunrise: 6:35am Sunday 14 August 2005 5h10m29s ISS Appears 5h09m35s -0.4m az:299.3d WNW h:23.5d Transit 5h10m29s -0.3m az:332.8d NNW h:28.3d Disappears 5h15m18s 5.6m az: 48.1d NE Partial good low horizon track on star chart Nautical twilight: 5:30am Sunrise: 6:36am - Canopus56(Kurt) ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
Canopus56 wrote:
Not being up for the drive to a true dark site, I went up to Little Mtn. Pass. It was the usual general public zoo of cars with lights on, but the seeing was good for an LRP site. Like Daniel, the shower was pretty much as advertised and as seen in prior years. The bollides and streamers all came right off the predicted radiant. I charted about 30 meteors between 2:30 and 3:00am at about the 60p/h rate. There was a short-spike of to 120p/h (2 per min) between 3:15-3:30pm. The rate stayed steady between 45-60p/h until astronomical twilight started around 5:00am.
I'm really not into solo meteor observing but I was still curious so between 0100 and 0500 I went up on my roof here in Stansbury for 15 minutes at the top of each hour to watch for Perseids. 0100-0115 = 4 0200-0215 = 5 0300-0315 = 12 0400-0415 = 19 0515-0530 = 6 Seeing was less than perfect. All around the horizon up to about 45 degrees altitude some high thin cirrus pretty well blocked out all but the brightest stars and meteors. And for my last session that moved nearly to the zenith. There were two very bright ones that left long trains lasting a couple of seconds but I saw no bolides or fireballs. While all of this was going on I had my observatory scope taking pictures of an asteroid I was following for another project. At the end of the night as I was going through the images I found one that had the asteroid and a Perseid. Considering the field of view is just 18' x 26' I didn't really expect to capture any meteors. Patrick
--- Patrick Wiggins <paw@trilobyte.net> wrote:
While all of this was going on I had my observatory scope taking pictures of an asteroid I was following
for another project. At the end of the night as I was going through the images I found one that had the asteroid and a Perseid. Considering the field of view is just 18' x 26' I didn't really expect to capture any meteors.
It's more frequent than you might think during showers. Although I don't do this personally, the International Meteor Organization has a telescopic meteor observing page that notes, "Telescopic meteors are just meteors seen through a telescope or binocular. That is irrespective that some are sufficiently luminous to be visible to the unaided eye. Most are the result of micro-meteoroids with masses in the range 10-4 to 10-10kg. They are exceedingly numerous. They make up the bulk of the meteor particles entering Earth's atmosphere. For example, the hourly rate of +9m meteors is about 10000." http://www.imo.net/tele/tmintro.html http://www.imo.net/tele/tmrationale.html http://www.imo.net/tele/index.html - Canopus56(Kurt) ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
participants (3)
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Canopus56 -
daniel turner -
Patrick Wiggins