Leonids from Lake Sonoma CA

by Robert Leyland


We had a nice display of Leonids at the lake. Overshadowed by intense moonlight. The great searchlight really was bright, most of us had color vision, able to see bright colors easily, and distinguish blues, browns and greens, as well as my red chair, Dougs dark red Dob, and his bright yellow ladder.

LM was about 4.5 at zenith, and away from the moon, and 4 or worse everywhere else. There was a bit of moisture at high altitude, which made the seeing very soft, and increased the moon glow. On a good new moon night we will usually get mag 6+ skies.

We had 6 astronomer types there, and maybe 10 general public only a few of whom took our invitation to view through the telescopes assembled. Some nice views of Saturn, along with a-b-c comparisons of eyepieces. The usual star-party fun :-)

from 8pm to 2am I counted 19 Leonids and 2 sporadics. Of these 3 were mag -2 or better fireballs, brighter than any star in the sky. Several were quite bright, including one at 8:01 pm that shot right by Deneb, but not quite fireball class.

There were some great colored meteors too, greens and reds mostly.

At 2AM my counts were around 1 per minute, and I switched to photographic mode, snapping a series of 1 minutes exposures with an old OM-1 and a fisheye lens. I also made a few 1:30 and :30 sec exposures too.

I am sure that the Leonids are photo-averse, as no sooner than I had ended one exposure, I'd hear an "oooh" from the seated crowd. Sadly I messed up the first roll as the film didn't advance properly, but I'm more hopeful for the second roll shot between 2:36 and 3:29 AM.

After 3:30 AM we watched the "stragglers" and it seems to me that the seemed to come in flurries. We'd get nothing for several minutes, and then 2-5 in less than a minute, followed by another quiet time.

Most of the crowd left between 3 and 4, Doug Davis and I closed up the area at about 4:30.

Summary: a better than average Leonid shower, not a storm, possibly a squall.