They're Coe-ing to take me away, ha ha! - Meteor fun.

by Matthew Marcus

I arrived at Coe at 4pm to find a parking lot which was rapidly filling up with TACos and 'civilians', as one person called them. The sky was encouraging but iffy. By the time it got dark, much of the sky was in cloud, leaving mostly sucker holes. At that point I started observing some old favorites which could survive the bright, wet skies. Seeing, as has been reported elsewhere, was intermittent. Sometimes I could see the Encke minimum, other times even Cassini's division was invisible. Later in the evening, the sky cleared up almost completely, then started to cloud up near dawn. The humidity was so high at first that my corrector dewed up even with the Mark Wagner Special dew-shield. I fought that problem by pushing the shield forward so it blocked out more sky and keeping the scope pointed at the ground for intervals. After a time, the humidity went down enough to render these measures unnecessary.

At first, it didn't seem like the Leonids were doing much. However, somewhere around midnight we started seeing the first meteors. By 0200 it was at a peak. I got the impression that the action was bursty, with flurries of activity separated by slack periods. Often, a meteor would be followed closely by another on a similar path. There were also pairs coming off the radiant in widely diverging directions. I await the statistical analysis of the data from the Peak to see if there really was something bursty and non-Poissonian going on. There were peaks of activity all the way till dawn.

The meteors were generally fast and bright, many leaving persistent trails. Such trails could often be seen in binox for several minutes, twisting and curling in the upper-air winds. I got the impression of a greenish color. Most meteors were 'all trail', appearing as white streaks, but some of the brighter ones showed an orange dot at the head. I'm guessing that this was a chunk of material which attained orange heat and was big enough to be seen against the background glow of the trail. Some meteors produced a bright flash at the end of their ranges. Some dimmed out in the middle, creating a two-part trail. Anyone know what that was about?

In addition to Leonids, there were also leftover Taurids, distinguished by their low speed, orangy color, and of course paths extrapolating back to Taurus.

I tried video recording of the storm. Unfortunately, I forgot to enable the time-stamping feature so the tapes are scientifically worthless. In my second tape (cut short due to battery drain), I counted 11 meteors in 69 minutes. I estimate the field of view as 40x30deg. Crunching the numbers, I get a pro-rated all-sky rate of about 160/hr. The camcorder did detect Regulus but nothing very much fainter. It's quite possible that I missed some meteors scanning through at FF speed.

Traffic was a madhouse. The road up to Park HQ was totally parked out. The cops came in and made everybody move their cars and cited and towed those cars not accompanied by their owners. This must have made a mint for Morgan Hill, but it was necessary as the road was blocked and emergency vehicles wouldn't have been able to get through. With the large numbers of people who were not astro-weenies, there was lots of light trespass with white flashlights, car dome lights, etc. Oh, well. I hope these people had a good time and maybe will join our hobby (fresh meat!).

Even with everything going on, I did get some observing done. The objects logged were:

I1747	An undistinguished 12-mag PN in Cas. I only picked it up because Peter Natscher (sp?) was going for it in his 10" (nice scope!). My notes column reads "wet sky".
747	An OC in Cas. A wedge inside a wedge, with an orange star at the top. Rather pretty.
Comet LINEAR WM1	A slight hint of a tail, echoed by a hint of asymmetry in the coma. Otherwise, it looked much like a face-on spiral with unresolved arms. In 15 minutes, it moved perceptably relative to background stars.
2383, 2384	A pair of OCs in CMa, part of my DeepMap 600 list. 2383 is an elliptical cloud of stars which resolves at 125x. 2384 is much sparser and has a prominent L-shaped asterism. Both clusters fit in a 125x field (~1/3 deg.).
2345	YA OC in CMa. A loose grouping.
2367	Ditto. Both part of the DeepMap 600 list.
2349	An OC in Pup, also part of that list. Looks a little like an outline of a turtle, with a bright star for a head.
2451, 2477	2451 is a naked-eye OC in Pup. In binox, it shows a 2-armed pinwheel shape with a bright orange star for a hub and a sprinkling of other stars below (S). To the E lies 2477, which in binox is a uniform, round smudge (also an OC). If it weren't so far S, 2451 would be considered a showpiece.
2775	Gx in Cancer. Now we're really jumping the seasons. It's small and round with a bright core.
Mel111	The Coma star cluster. I've seen it zillions of times before, of course, but somehow had never logged it. Omission repaired.
4450	Gx in Coma. Middling large, reasonably bright. Showed up decently despite being low.
4710	Edge-on Gx in Coma. NSOG cited mottling visible, and I think I saw it in averted vision. I'll have to try this one again in its proper season, when it's higher.

I also went for a galaxy which turns out to be one of the Coma cluster. I saw two at about the right spot. I couldn't tell which of the crowd of galaxies these two were, so I decided to hold off on logging until it's higher and I'm able to confuse myself with more galaxies in that field.

Other un-logged objects include the Double Cluster, Epsilon and Delta Lyrae, M1, M35, 2903, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, M44, M67, 147 and 185. I just realized I should have had a look at M46, since Puppis was up and that's one of my favorites. It's a 2-fer with that PN inside the OC, and a nice OC at that.

I left as the false dawn (zodiacal light) was giving way to the true dawn. Definitely a night to remember!