At around 7:40pm NZST on 7 June 1999 while chatting to a neighbour underneath an outside light and about 12 metres from a street light, I saw three bright meteors streak through the sky near Libra, heading towards Mars. Later I checked and found there were apparently no meteor showers right then, so went outside to watch and between about 11:20 and 11:50 saw another eight meteors. If they were all part of the one shower, a rough guess at the radiant would be near the border between Scorpio and Sagittarius, although this could be out by 10 or even 20 degrees because they were all well away from the radiant.

I wrote and advised the Auckland and Wellington observatories, but they never replied. Is there an official organisation I should notify?

The same meteors were visible on 7 June 2000, close to midnight, but the nights before and after and the last two years the sky was too cloudy to see anything, and looks like it may be cloudy here again this year.

So if any of you have clear skies, please look out for them. It would be fun to have discovered a regular undocumented meteor shower.

Midnight NZ time? Unfortunately a very big star up in the sky will hinder any observation from my site that hour.

Try the International Meteor Organization. They're probably the best ones to talk to. They don't have any showers listed at this time either, but we have just come off of the Eta Aquarids, which may not be too far off from your guess of the radiant.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Kiwi, you mentioned Scorpio and Sagittarius. What about the or the Omega Scorpiids or the Sagittariids? The Omega Scorpiids can go on for months.

[quote="Argos"]Well, hopefully not the same meteors. It would be a little weird if a specific particle entered the Earth's atmosphere, burnt up, and then re-entered the Earth's atmosphere again 1 year later.

Meteor streams are not always that precise from year to year because their orbital path that the Earth crosses can be spread out in space a bit. I suggest those of us who can, to pick an hour or more that is convenient and dark to watch.

If we have clear skies, I'll take an hour watch. But, we have too much light pollution to be able to see much.

Forgot to add, midnight is always the best time for spotting meteors if Earth is in the dust stream because of the direction of the Earth's orbit. Before midnight we are behind the stream and after midnight we are facing it. Something like that anyway.

If the Earth does not cross the dust stream at midnight, then obviously, the time it does cross would be better. I had to add this before Grapes pointed it out. :wink: just kidding Grapes.

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Many thanks for those links from those of you who are helpful. Unfortunately I have to figure out what the sites mean when they quote RA in degrees to fully understand them.

It looks like the Omega Scorpiids have the wrong radiant but the Sagittariids could be about right, although at a quick look I didn't see ZHR figures that were anything like the the number I saw. Nor did I see any mention of brightness. The thing I most recall about this shower was that they were big and bright -- similar to the Orionids. I didn't have to get dark-adapted to see them and they were easy to see when I looked just past a street light with its glare in my eyes.

The 8th of June 1999 was cloudy, but I saw seven meteors from the same area on the 9th, though some were not as bright as on the 7th. The radiant seemed to be in the vicinity of M6 or M7.

My New Zealand Almanac 2003 says "No meteor shower activity" for June and shows the Eta Aquarids finishing on 28 May -- the next shower being the Alpha Capricornids starting on 3 July, then three more showers starting on 7, 8 & 9 July.

They're definitely back this year. It's 9:24pm 6 July and in about half an hour tonight I saw two close to Corvus, coming from the direction of Scorpo's tail, and that's with variable 50% to 100% cloud cover and heaps of distant lightning flashes. The first meteor was about as bright as Spica and the second much brighter.

I've just spoken to a nearby astronomer who was at a star party last Saturday night and he saw three of them in about two hours without even looking for them, and other people saw more. They decided that they radiant was a little south of the border between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Am I right in guessing that when meteor people quote 270 degrees RA they mean the same as 18h 0m 0s?

You may want to know more specifically, but to just watch for meteors, it doesn't matter too much where the source is. You just look up in the direction of the most open sky. If enough meteors are spotted, the radius will be apparent. But they strike the atmosphere at different angles so they actually appear anywhere. (Maybe you already knew that.)

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Kind of weird that this came up. Last night, June 5th, I was out in my backyard taking pictures of the moon, when I, and my wife, oserved a meteor travling south to north, through the Big Dipper. I do know of a metoer shower next month, but it was nice to see a lone metoer outside of any showers.

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Is OK. Before I'm done, no one will be using "always".

When we watch the Perseids every year, the midnight rule works fairly consistently because the dust stream is more evenly distributed. But going out for the Leonids storm, the specific hours the peaks were predicted held true.

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Update 9:48pm NZST 7 June 2003.

It starting raining soon after my last post, so I couldn't do any more viewing. Tonight, the sky is perfectly clear -- even with the brightening Moon, Omega Centauri and the LMC are naked-eye sights. From 7:02 till 8:01 I saw only one of the same meteors at 7:38, travelling from about three degrees below Alpha Triangulum Australis to just below Beta Carinae. Will watch again later, but they may now be past their peak. Two other meteors appeared to come from Scorpio's head, so could have been Omega Scorpiids.

Another feature of this mystery shower is that the meteors are exploders -- at the end of their travel they dim down and then flare up briefly to a state much brighter than before. They are bright enough that currently the moonlight doesn't obscure seeing them, and light pollution would have to be extreme to do so.

No sightings between 11:30 and 12:30 local time, but then I could only see about 10 stars. Man, this light pollution is starting to make me long for a trip out of town.

BTW, did you see this on spaceweather.com?

So much for your source that said there were no meteor showers in June.

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The meteor pages I linked to before came from Gary Kronk's meteor pages. It's pretty good. It categorizes the showers by Major, Moderate, Minor, and Daylight Activity. The June page shows no Major Activity--that may be what that almanac was referring to.

PS: Following one of Gary's links, to the Amer. Meteor Society, I found a weekly meteor observing column by AMS Operations Manager Robert Lunsford. Unfortunately, it's not updated for this last week!

I think the big reason why meteor shower observation is better after midnight is because then the Earth rotates into the debris stream, adding its rotational velocity to the velocity of the incoming particles. This makes them come in faster and burn up brighter, so more meteors should become visible from that time.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

One pity about some of these links is that many pages don't give a description of the meteors. It's handy to know if there's a particular characteristic, such as: Fast, blue, brilliant; Certain years only; Dim, yellow, slow, long paths; Bright, exploding; etc. Down at my local beach one mild winter night I watched three showers at once and one of them left very long, slow trails, but they were so dim that I had to be fully dark-adapted to see them and dark sky was necessary.

No viewing tonight for me due to heavy overcast.

The big question I have is, exactly what shower have I and others been viewing, and is it a new shower? These meteors are bigger and brighter than most showers I've seen, except for possibly the Orionids.

I left a message about this thread with the IMO, but they don't seem to have a link where anyone can leave reports, just an email address for the webmaster who may not even be an astronomer.

One thing that concerns me is that I wrote to two observatories in June 1999 giving as much detail as possible, including maps of what I saw, and got no reply. Now, I wasn't reporting a yellow UFO hovering in the west just after sunset, the sort of thing they get all the time. Personally it's not a big deal because I don't have a big ego which constantly demands praise, but I do feel a little disappointed for anyone else who contacts observatories with a report of some genuinely interesting observation if their efforts are likewise ignored. In my opinion observatories should encourage the public to submit reports.

For instance, at 11:40pm on 27 December 1990 I saw the biggest fireball I've yet seen. It took 7-9 seconds to traverse 34 degrees of sky and even then disapperared behind a very big tree. I was running to see if I could see it on the other side and my pounding heart left me guessing about the exact duration -- I was trying to count off seconds at the right pace. I actually counted to ten seconds, but think I was probably counting too fast. The fireball was travelling almost horizontal at 10-12 degerees elevation and was possibly magnitude -12. I'd guess it was above the Tasman Sea about 200 km away, maybe more. Even though I'd been into astronomy for six years, I had no idea that I should have reported it immediately, nor what to report, and only learnt this years later from an astronomy magazine.

Any comments on the lack of response?

Hey, this is cool. Just followed one of Kilopi's links and came across a type of shower I've never heard of before: the Antihelion source (scroll down to about the middle).

So basically, it's not a regular shower, but a constant rain of asteroid debris hitting us on the dark side as it heads sunward. The radius is therefore always the point directly opposite the sun. Neat.

Edit: There are also the Northern and Southern Apex sources, which are similarly unusual all-year showers.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

I followed some of Gary Kronk's links, and found a link to the Fireball Report Form at the Fireball Data Center of the International Meteor Organization. Also, Gary lists a link for Meteorobs, an email list for meteor observing, and there are archives of the list going back seven years. HTH.

Here's a report I like that I'm incorprating in a local history. I live at the mouth of the Rangitikei River. Richard Taylor was the Anglican minister at Wanganui and a naturalist.

SUN 4 DEC 1864. Around 2am a loud noise could be heard all through the Rangitikei and Wanganui district. Richard Taylor, who was staying at Major J W Marshall's Tutu Totara near Marton, wrote: "About two o'clock I was awoke by a remarkable rumbling sound, very loud and lasting near two minutes. At first I thought it was a herd of horses rushing past, but when it lasted so long I thought we were going to have a fearful earthquake. Then as there was no shake I thought it must be either a subterranean sound or thunder. The singularity of it was that the sound continued the same without increasing or decreasing in loudness for such a length of time. It then terminated with isolated pop-pops diminishing in loudness until they gradually faded away. I never heard such a sound before. I thought I saw flashes of light, but very feeble ones. I found in the morning at the breakfast table that all were as much astonished as I was. The natives of the Houhou heard the noise and said it was a token of war."

MON 5 DEC 1864. Taylor headed back toward Wanganui. "I was amused to hear the different ideas about the noise. Some thought it was an earthquake, some thunder, some the escape of gas from the bowels of the earth, some an eruption of Tongariro, but all declared they never heard such a noise before. At Turakina I called on Fox who would have me take a cup of tea. He said that some person there was up when the noi