Leonids

by Phil Chambers, Rod Norden, Mark Wagner, Matt Tarlach, Bob Czerwinski, Paul LeFevre, Jon Ruyle, David Finn, Jay Reynolds Freeman

19:35:19 Phil Chambers

MONTEB IS VARIABLE RIGHT NOW but clear overhead

fog to the west

the sky has gone from bad to good to bad several times so for. Currently it is low clouds or high fog overhead and looks as though it is getting worse.

19:57:39 Phil Chambers

Not giving up however. There are 4 of us here now. The ricochet modem has actaually connected but at about 5 bits per hour. and only in one spot in teh parking lot.

Any report I give will be outdated in 10 min so I am turning this thing off.

23:36:17 Rod Norden

I've been out under clear skies from NW Austin since the moon went down ~45 min ago, and I've seen 7 Leonids and 2 sporadics. Leo is fully up now, and it is not as good as last year in my humble opinion. It is 0130 CST. Transparency is good from the edge of the city.

00:38:15 Mark Wagner

7 Leonids? Lucky you. I got skunked at Montebello (well, I did have one sporadic just before leaving).

...the clouds were such that the group saw maybe two meteors in all the hours preceeding Leo rising. Normally we'd see a dozen or so. We also knew the peak had passed, and I didn't want to wait until 2 or so to see a handful through the milky sky.

02:15:43 Matt Tarlach

Weather and non-astronomical obligations have combined to limit my November skygazing, and for a while I thought I was going to be skunked by the Leonids as well. But as I left for work yesterday morning (Wednesday) at about 5AM PST, I looked up to see the overcast blocking only about half the dark morning sky. I stood in the street next to my warming car for about five minutes, noticing how high Leo had risen in the morning sky since the last clear morning I looked up...and caught a Leonid meteor. Short, about 15d path length, and slow, moving through the galaxy-rich patch of sky below Leo's hindquarters, around magnitude 0 or -1. Watched for a few more minutes but that was it, and duty called...at least I caught one.

Glad to hear some of you had better success, and especially enjoyed Jane's report.

07:37:17 Bob Czerwinski

Yep, we were skunked, Mark. The best one of the night came around 12:30am; a nice bright one, right out of the sickle, leaving a nice long (and even green) ionized trail. That brought my personal count for the night ... to two.

Jon Ruyle and crew were still there when I left. Anything else come by, Jon?

08:11:14 Paul LeFevre

TV people at Coe??!!

Ah, well. There went our chance for fame, drowned out in the Montebello fog and dew.

I saw a few faint zippers and one nice, long, trailing meteor (I was talking to Mark Wagner at the time, and he had his face to me and his back to the meteor...so he missed the one nice one of the night). That put my count at exactly 4 in 5 hours. Ho-hum. At least we were shuffling around in the cold and dew in good company. Special thanks to Bob C. for hauling out his TV-101, so we could at least look at Jupiter & Saturn for a bit.

10:22:25 Jon Ruyle

We stayed till about 2am and saw maybe a dozen more, about half of which seemed to be Leonids. Nothing brighter than what we saw earlier, though. At around 2 it started to cloud up again, so we went home.

Thanks again, Bob, for the looks through the tv101.

11:11:40 David Finn

Had a great time at Montebello last night looking at Jupiter and Saturn and putting faces behind the silhouettes I see at DARK sky parties and the dismbodied names I see on this list. Nice to meet you all even if the night was a disappointment meteor-wise. After about 3-4 hours, the cold chased me into my car to warm and catch a few z's before what I hoped would be a better show after midnight.

Waking a midnight I found the group still with no better luck than when I'd gone to sleep a few hours ago. Then, almost immediately, I saw , at about 1210, a nice, bright, long fast one, heading in the right direction to be a Leonid. Nice! But not nice enough, when the skies remained meteor free for another 10 minutes, to keep me around, braving the cold.

I drove home to SF, where the skies were...CLEAR!! At about 230am, I saw nothing in about 15 minutes, BUT... at about 315 I went up on my roof in the Richmond District and in 2 minutes saw THREE NICE ones rapid fire, and then a while later 2 more faint ones. Total of 5 in about 5 minutes! But then Sleep, the Evil Emperor beckoned, and I hit the sack at 330.

Thanks again for good company at Montebello. Until next time...

12:47:12 Jay Reynolds Freeman

I was at Montebello from 9 PM to 11 PM PST 17 November, parked with my car driver-side window facing where Leo would be rising. I bagged it early because it looked as if the clouds were thickening. I saw one sporadic during that interval.