by Bruce Jensen
The main road near the site was heavily occupied by perhaps 150 vehicles, with people lying on the dirt/grass embankments and even in the driving areas in sleeping bags and lounge chairs. I tiptoed my Dodge Grand Caravan through the crowds and the gate, and we proceeded to set up our own observing station up at 1:30.
We watched. We waited. I listened to the radio. We watched. We waited.
20 minutes, 30 minutes rolled by - the sky spit a Leonid here, a Leonid there, every five or six minutes, just about what you'd expect from the typical November 17 meteor shower. I continued messing with the radio, trying to find a clear channel in the low end of the FM band on which to try the ion-trail/radio propagation experiment (I had no luck with this, stations packed the band - part of the "curse" of living in a metro area). At 2:25, after almost an hour of practically nothing, I was beginning to wonder if the experts had gotten it wrong...
...and then, in a blink, four or five very zippy meteors came barreling through at once, splaying out across the sky from Gemini to Ursa Major. I begin to nudge Nicholas, who was by now back into his usual comatose sleep, to open his eyes (which were having some trouble with the brightness of the moon), and after several attempts I was able to rouse him.
The storm didn't catch right away. It came in fits and starts, with sporadic batches of small to medium-brightness shooters, and this went on for about 12 minutes. I was thinking, "Not too bad - two or three per minute, zippy small fry and some big lunkers, ZHR about 120 to 180 per hour - worth the drive."
Then, without any warning at all, and much to our delight, at 2:38 AM PST, the Earth must have zeroed in on the core of the 1866 Tempel-Tuttle path, because almost all at once the rate increased by a factor of 5 to 10. For about seven minutes, the sky became a near rerun of 2001, with many batches of meteors crackling from the Lion's head in all directions, including toward the eastern horizon. I didn't do a total count, but with a few minutes' worth of spot checks showing up to about 15 per minute, it seemed that the visual ZHR rose to about 900 for at least a brief few minutes at the peak centered around 2:42 AM. It was magnificent, with bursts and groups of meteors splashing into view like delicate cascades, and a few fireballs leaving glowing trails and even exploding into brilliance, much the same as last year's spectacle. I have no doubt that, without the moon, which probably diminished the limiting magnitude by as much as 2, we would have doubled or even tripled that count to something resembling the storm of 2001. As it was, the show was a gem, and easily beating any other meteor shower of my life save for last year's.
After about 2:46 AM, the number dropped off again about as rapidly as it had rose, and the rate dropped back to perhaps 100 to 200/hour. 10 minutes later, the temporally nearly-symmetrical event dwindled back to a scattered few, and we decided by about 3 AM to pack it up.
On the way out we passed those throngs of people once again; speaking to a few of them, it seemed that at least one of them was waiting to see the "biggest bolides," which he believed followed the main event and occupied the outer fringes of the particle stream. His thought was that these larger objects acted as "shepherds" for the smaller particles, keeping them in line, much the way Saturn's moons shepherd the ring particles into place. I thought about this as I drove out; however, owing to the knowledge that even big fireballs result from quite tiny objects with minimal mass, I wasn't quite prepared to accept the idea that pea-sized meteors were in any position gravitationally to tell a bunch of dust motes what to do from 20,000 miles away. Nonetheless, I silently wished him well, and drove back to San Lorenzo to deposit both my son and myself back in bed by 4 AM.