Monday, August 16, 2010

Meteor reports

Hi Y'all,
Hope you all had as good a show as we did at Mizpe Mesua. I heard from several folks who were disappointed in the number  meteors or the weather, but that is how it goes. When I left home, it was partly cloudy in Efrat and as I drove toward Bet Shemesh the sky got totally covered. However when I got to Emek Ha'ela the clouds miraculously cleared. Up at Mizpe Mesua there was still a lot of humidity and haze, but very acceptable. Daniel Babylonian Jackson was there with Susan and with his 3 scopes including his Behemoth 14 inch. There were about 40 people from the Jerusalem Mosaic club, and all kinds of other small groups and families who showed up too. I was busy pointing out stars and planets in my telescope so I did not catch all the meteors, but the group saw between 3-40 meteors from 10pm to 2am. Not bad!  Surprisingly most of the ones we saw were bright fireballs. The Mosaic folks left at 2am and then I helped the Babylonian pack up his gear. It really seemed like the meteors stopped after that. I wonder if we were just missing all the faint ones which peaked after 2am due to the haze and thin clouds that started rolling in and luckily just saw the earlier  fireballs

Here are some links.

So what did you see? Add your comments below.

-tom

2 comments:

  1. The peak of the shower was long before the Perseus constellation rose. Which means that the rata at Israel was not more than 20ZHR, and since the radiant was not high in the horizon I do not think that anyone saw more than 10 Perseids in an hour.
    However just like every night there are many sporadic meteors. I think that most people mistook them for Perseids.
    Gadi

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  2. We definitely saw some sporadic meteors going the wrong direction. They where very impressive too. But most of the meteors where going the right direction to be Perseids
    -tom

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