WhooooHoooooo!!!!!

Everybody please ignore my previous post (well, mostly ignore it). It turns out that the clouds I cursed at so loudly moved out as fast as they came in. Stepping out again at 2:45 I saw that the sky was mostly clear.

For the first 20 minutes it was wonderful. I never saw so many bright meteors before. as mentioned by others, they seemed to come in bursts. But just after 3:00 another cloud bank came in and covered the whole sky. This was interesting though, as they turned out to not be very thick. I could see Jupiter and the brighter stars through most of it. So I ended up watching and seeing quite a few bright meteor flashes through the clouds. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Things partially cleared up about 3:30 and by 3:45 were mostly clear again. Peaks of activity came about every 20 minutes, with meteors averaging maybe one per 5 seconds in those times. Overall I'd say the average was about 3 or 4 per minute between 3:30 and 4:30. The peak of activity was between 4:10 and 4:20; coming about one per second or two. After 4:45 it died out considerably, and I decided to come home at 5:30 when I was only seeing one bright one every 5 minutes or so. (and it was getting cold too.)

I never saw the "thousands" that were predicted (unless it happened during the cloud cover), but I did see dozens. The coolest sighting was when I saw four at once: three in a kind of claw formation and a 4th one below it. The best thing however was the large number of very bright fireballs. They were as bright as the brightest Persieds, only they came in faster and weren't as yellow. At one point it seemed like every other meteor was like that. I can't count how many there were that left bright smoke trails, 20 or 30 at least. The 2 best ones were just after I started. One was very bright and glowed blue-white with sparks shedding off it. The other was partly obscured by a house, but it left a trail that I could see in binoculars for a long time afterwards.

Overall, this turned out to be the best shower I've seen in ages, if not ever. If the clouds hadn't interfered, It would have been perfect. I guess I still have to wait for a real storm though.

(Oh, and I spotted another Taurid, too. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img])
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David Hall
"Dave... my mind is going... I can feel it... I can feel it."

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: David Hall on 2001-11-18 14:32 ]</font>