I am still too time-shifted from a recent trip to London to stay up much past 10 pm. So I skipped Montebello last night and woke up about 4:30 this morning. A peak out the window showed variably milky skies in Palo Alto, but enough of Leo peaking through that I decided to head out and see what was left of the Leonids.
I carried a reclining chair, a Televue Ranger, and some binoculars to a nearby fairly dark hill. I poked around the sky with the Ranger, looking at venus, double stars, and some favorite open clusters in Orion and Puppis. In between finding objects, I saw a half dozen or so Leonids by chance, mostly between 1st and 3rd magnitude and two of them slightly greenish with visible trails.
Around 5:30, most of the sky was clear of milk towards the zenith west of Leo. I capped up the telescope, settled into the chair, and just watched the sky for 20 minutes or so. During that time I counted 16 meteors. Four of them were around 1st magnitude, had a greenish sizzle, and left obvious smoke trails that were visible for several seconds.
This years catch were a couple of magnitudes fainter than the very active, bright, and dramatic Leonids I saw last year from the same spot. Nevertheless, I was pleased to have seen as many meteors as I did. If I had stayed in England a few days longer, maybe I could have caught the real Leonids show, which appears to have arrived pretty much as predicted (1 to 1:30 UT today) with peak zenith hourly rates around 2000.
On the other hand, I hardly saw a star in the sky the whole time I was in England because of the overcast weather at night (peak hourly cloud rate-zillions). Conditions have been been iffy here all week, but I feel fortunate to have caught both the mercury transit and a handful of green Leonids in my first few days back.