| Leonids 2001!! |
| On sunday November 18, I saw the best meteor shower I have ever seen. Me and the people I was with started watching at about 11:00 PM Saturday and finally went home at about 5:00 AM Sunday. It was bitterly cold but the excitement was enough to fend off frost bite. There were a few bolides bright enough to cast shadows on the ground. I was fortunate enough to be looking at the right spot at the right time for one bolide, it started as a rapidly moving orange spot that brightened to a dim whitish as it moved. Then suddely exploded in a flash of brilliant blueish-white light. I made the animated .gif on the right to losely illustrate what I saw (the vapour trail lasted longer than in the image). It left a vapour trail at the point that it exploded that lasted for about 5 minutes. At about 3:40 AM the shower peaked, and we were calling out so many meteors that George, the counter, could hardly keep up. The meteors seemed to arrive in bursts, there would be about 30 seconds of high activity then there would only be the odd meteor for about the next 15 seconds then another active period, Below is a simplified version of the recorded data from that night, the peak is in bold. |
| recorded about 10km South west of Vegreville, Alberta Observer Time (MST) # of meteors meteors/min Rob Hughes 23:10-23:25 12 0.8 George Turnbull 00:00-00:15 9 0.6 George Turnbull 00:15-00:30 3 0.2 George Turnbull 00:30-00:45 8 0.5 George Turnbull 00:45-01:00 14 0.9 George Turnbull 01:00-01:15 5 0.3 Rob Hughes 01:15-01:30 22 1.5 Rob Hughes 01:30-01:45 14 0.9 Rob Hughes 01:45-02:00 37 2.5 George Turnbull 02:00-02:15 56 3.7 George Turnbull 02:15-02:30 65 4.3 Group 02:30-02:45 144 9.6 Group 02:45-03:00 180 12.0 Group 03:00-03:15 256 17.1 Group *03:15-03:25 218 21.8 Group **03:25-03:30 130 26.0 Group 03:30-03:35 108 21.6 Group 03:35-03:40 175 35.5 Group 03:40-03:45 240 48.0 Group 03:45-03:50 157 31.4 Group 03:50-03:55 122 24.4 Group 03:55-04:00 165 33.0 |
| *count period changes to 10 minutes **count period changes to 5 minutes Thanks to Rob Hughes for the chart |
| Annual meteor showers are the result of the earth passing through the orbit of a comet. Since the earth revolves around the sun exactly once every year (that is how a year is measured) it passes through the point that the comet and earths orbits intersect at the same time every year. The Leonids are an annual shower that show a breif increase in activity about every 33 years. This is because 33 years is the orbital period of comet Tempel-Tuttle, the parent comet of the Leonid shower. When the comet has recently passed there are more meteoroids. Meteors in a meteor shower appear to radiate outward from one point called the radiant. This is because of the fact that the earth is moving through the patch of meteoroids (a good analogy is the way snowflakes appear to radiate outward from the center of the windshield when you are driving in a blizzard). The meteor shower is generally named after the constellation in which its radiant lies, eg: the Leonid radiant is in the constellation Leo. The Leonid meteors move at a rate of 71km/s, making them the fastest meteors of any shower. |
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