Observing meteor showers

Photo: David Finlay

Leonid Observing Report Monday 19th November 2001 by David Finlay

Member of the Wollongong Amateur Astronomy Club (WAAC)

Observing Location: Orange, NSW, Australia

Living in Wollongong, a large coastal city an hours drive south of Sydney, I find that more often than not astronomical events are interrupted by bad weather. I have tried to observe the Leonids from ’96 onwards only to have the weather turn promising nights into disasters. With good predictions for activity in Australia in 2001 I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from observing my first meteor storm.

I am starting to believe the Leonids bring bad weather with them. On Sunday night (the storm was predicted for 4am Monday morning) the clouds dutifully rolled in from the south and parked right above half the state. I switched to “Plan B” and called a fellow Astronomy club member, Rudi Vavra, who was staying in Lithgow on the other side of the Blue Mountains, and my Father, John Finlay, who lives in Orange. They both said the weather was clear where they were and seeing as Lithgow is on the road to Orange I packed my bag and headed off on a four-hour driving adventure.

Orange is three hours drive west of Sydney and is where I fell in love with the sky as a child. When I arrived in Lithgow to meet up with Rudi, there was more cloud on the way so we decided that Orange was the best place to go.

At 11pm we set up camp half way between Orange and Bathurst at a place called Macquarie Woods. It was bitterly cold. The wind chill factor would have put the temperature well below freezing. The next day we found out that it had been snowing on the outskirts of Orange. We were not surprised.

Cloud began to move in from the east at 1am so we drove a bit further until we were almost at Orange airport. Hoping that the farmer whose front yard we had parked in wouldn’t come out and shoot us, we bunkered down in Rudi’s wagon waiting for the show to begin.

At precisely 2:15am, peering out the front windscreen, we saw two faint earth-grazers chase each other from the eastern horizon all the way to the west. Ten minutes later we saw another horizon-to-horizon grazer. These things just seemed to glide across the sky like missiles. We nicknamed them “Scuds”.

At 2:30am we began to see real Leonids blazing across the sky. They were coming in at a rate of about one every two minutes. We observed bright white and faint, green fireballs for another 15 minutes before the cloud caught up with us again and we had to move. It was very frustrating because we knew that we were missing out on observing the Leonids by having to get in the cars and move to another location again.

For the next forty-five minutes we madly drove around the outskirts of Orange desperately seeking a clear patch of sky. The whole time we were driving we could see fireballs through gaps in the cloud whizzing past the cars like someone was shooting tracer bullets at us.

About 10 km west of Orange we decided that we were missing out on too much activity and pulled off the road up a dirt track. We could see about sixty per cent of the sky. The meteors were coming thick and fast by this stage, at least fifteen to twenty per minute. They seemed to come in flurries, where several would follow each other into a fiery oblivion. I called my Father and set my red flashing light on the main road and before we knew it he was observing with us.

We observed meteors like this until 5:10am when it began to rain and the Sun had almost peaked above the horizon. The radiant was easy to see with every single meteor pointing back to its origin. We saw lots of small bright meteors around the radiant, huge fireballs trailing sparks through Crux and Orion, and a lot that began their death-plunge on the opposite side of the sky on the western horizon. We saw one meteor that was bright enough to leave shadows on the ground and a glowing green trail that was visible for five minutes.

It was an absolutely amazing experience. If I ever have the opportunity to see a meteor storm again I’d travel twice as far to see it. If I had the money I would travel around the world.

Once we arrived at my parent’s place for coffee it was virtually daylight with ninety per cent cloud cover. When I stepped out of my car I saw another fireball directly above. If conditions were better I could almost imagine observing them in broad daylight. Definitely worth the drive!