Anyone else out there watch for meteors on a regular basis? I ask because last night the wife and I were sitting outside when the wife got a good look at a nice long lasting meteor. It was over my shoulder and back behind the storage unit so I missed it. If you are lucky or just look at the night sky long enough I know you will see your fair share of meteors even without a "shower" going on. I also know there is no shower going on now, so I thought I was SOL for last night. But I continued to look up and less than a minute later I saw one. Lucky me, I thought.
Then a couple of more minutes passed and we saw another one. And another one. And another one.
In a thirty minute period we saw 12 to 15 of them. The thing is, because of where we were sitting we probably had only 30% of the sky visible to us. Even if we just double the rate we saw last night, 24-30 per hour makes for a pretty damn good meteor shower. I looked around online for a culprit and really couldn't find one. There is a little shower called the Capricornids, but it usually doesn't peak until early August and it doesn't normally account for more than a couple meteors an hour.
I enjoy meteor showers quite a bit and I have spent my fair share of nights looking for them, but I never had witnessed an unexpected shower like last nights.
Has anyone else? Its a long shot, but maybe one of my regular readers is an astronomy hound??
You never know.
5 comments:
I don't know of any events that fit your description precisely but this page may have some info you could use.
http://www.reentrynews.com/upcoming.html
We also saw the most amazing meteor a few nights ago, thursday night, july 5, 2007 around 9:45pm. We were on our roofdeck, facing west, and the meteor approached from the northeast travelling southwest at a very fast pace. It created a long orange tail & seemed VERY close. It seemed to last approximately 4 seconds but was the most amazing & bright comet I've ever seen. We live in Kansas City & it was still very clear & bright. Can't amagine how bright it must have looked WITHOUT light pollution. Do you know anyone else who might have noticed it ? What part of the country do you live ? Interested in hearing from others who may have witnessed the event.
Thanks entropy. I don't think it could have been re-entering spacejunk, as it had the classic meteor shower scattering. But that page will come in handy in the future!
D: We live in western Wisconsin not too far from the Twin Cities metro. The time and the location on the sky match up with the first one my wife saw. The others were much fainter (although there was another fairly bright one right after 10pm) so we might have been added by our darker sky. My wife thought the tail was white but that might just be because of our different atmospherics.
I'm gonna have to rememebr to check out the sky this time of year in 2008...maybe we've got a new shower?
Saw a few nice ones Saturday night, 'way out in the country and far away from "light pollution." So clear and sharp that the Milky Way stood out clearly.
There are half a dozen or more minor "showers" during July, and collectively they can easily produce up to 20 or 30 nicely visible meteor trails an hour in the right viewing conditions. And of course there are random meteors not associated with cyclical/directional shower events.
I know what you mean Tully. I just thought it was odd to see so many when our viewing conditions were so far from perfect. (Only part of the sky, and that was the sky with the worse light pollution.) I'll just chalk it up to luck.
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