This year’s Leonid meteor shower was a real spectacle witnessed by many IAAA members. Each gave great reports! We’ll start with Joe Bergeron’s comments: “This shower/storm was absolutely awesome. I started looking at 11:40 PST and saw 40 mostly bright Leonids in the next half hour. These had orange heads and greenish trains. The rate started to pick up around 1AM. After that it entered the "storm" category, with a sustained period of 2-3 meteors per second. It was impossible to look anywhere in the sky without seeing multiple meteors at all times. Sometimes a flash would announce a bright meteor in a part of the sky I wasn't looking at. Quite a few left persistent trains lasting up to a minute. Some of these meteors were brilliant at magnitude -5 or so, and most were at least magnitude 2 or better. These later meteors tended to be whiter or bluer, still with greenish or bluish trains. “The view of the radiant was incredible, with constant diverging streaks showing the position of the radiant without ambiguity. It looked like a meteor shower in a movie, madly exaggerated. It surpassed every shower I've ever seen before by a factor of a hundred. I must have seen something like 5,000 meteors in all.” Robin Hart watched from her home in California: “What a show! My husband and I had an excellent view of the shower from my deck (we face due east). The only part of the sky obscured by the house was the west. I would have loved to have climbed up on the roof but it’s a 3 story drop to the bottom. We were clouded in around 11:00 and miracle of miracles the sky cleared up around 1:00 in the morning leaving only a few high clouds. “For a while around the peak at 2:00-3:00 am it really looked like a shower. Often in my field of view, at least 10 would flash off at one time. Meteors around the radiant were short and fast and there were many spectacular pairs and triples going through Orion's belt that were long and left long after images. I have never seen pairs or triples before. They reminded me of aircraft flying in formation. The interesting thing was that they were about the same magnitude. There were a number of brilliant fireballs mostly in the northeasterly direction, but none bright enough to light up the whole sky. That still has to be bested by the beautiful purple fireball I saw some years ago during the Perseids that lit up the whole parking lot. We stayed out until 3:30 when things started to slow down and it just got too darned cold and damp. This will go in my book of memorable meteor showers!” Don Davis also watched the shower from California and has this to say: “Well, this was the one to see, and I'm glad I saw it from the vicinity of Joshua Tree National Park. Saturday began forebodingly with a near overcast of high clouds, but by sunset I could see the crescent Moon and fair amounts of blue sky. By midnight the stars and planets shone brightly with just a hint of thin clouds here and there. While leaving for the dark desert I saw a bright meteor whiz overhead as soon as I opened my front door, a good omen! During the 90-minute trip to the park entrance I watched the modest light pollution of the desert cities withdraw behind me. There were momentary glints of meteors occasionally seen near the horizon but I did my best to avoid being distracted by looking for them. Along the actual entrance road to Joshua Tree there were dozens of cars also heading for this well known viewing site, and at the last moment I turned off onto a dirt road just outside main entrance into a dark relatively secluded area, deciding to let the other people worry about where they were going to park.
“It was about 1:40 A.M. when I stopped, got out my digital camera and tripod, then stood around and let my eyes dark adapt. For the first time in my life I didn't have to wait to see meteors. Leonids were everywhere, and the majority were quite bright, perhaps first magnitude and brighter. Looking towards the head of Leo, occasional very short meteors appeared, generally drawn out by perspective into longer streaks further from the radiant point. Most meteors across the sky were white streaks 10 degrees or so in length, but the brighter ones stretched across much more of the sky. These would leave glowing trails that would fade typically within 10 seconds or so. The few very brightest fireballs had dazzling heads leading dimmer streaks of the brightness of ordinary larger meteors. One exceptionally brilliant example flashed overhead and was bright enough to cast shadows. “Sometime between 2 and 3 A.M. the number of meteors seen was astounding, for sustained periods at least one per second. Many times I saw two at once, and even three appeared simultaneously. There seemed to be a tendency for paired meteors to be the same brightness. Once I saw two meteors perhaps -2 magnitude appear and move away from each other into the outer peripheral vision of both eyes. I had a distinct impression that brighter events tended to come in clusters, so if you saw one bright meteor in a given region of the sky you would anticipate seeing more in that general area at once. At times a meteor would briefly blaze, then fade, and another would appear where the first should have gone as if nearby particles were hitting the atmosphere after drifting apart along the same path. Once three such 'blinks' appeared along a meteors path as if it were 'skipping'. There were moments when I saw many meteors within a few seconds wherever I looked. You would literally glance away just in time to see a new event take place just after seeing another one. “There must have been about 5000 meteors per hour during the peak, and very few empty periods such as during regular meteor showers. I would look in any direction and see either a Leonid or the fading trail of one. At times I was seeing sparks here and there across my visual field which reminded me of seeing isolated fireflies winking on and off in a wide dark farmland. Sometimes meteors would be diffused by intervening southerly clouds. Once in awhile an unseen fireball would light up the entire scene as if someone far away was using a flashbulb. As Leo and the radient climbed, the Zodiacal Light towered beyond the hilly horizon tilted modestly towards the right, or south. The inner Zodiacal light was brighter than the region of the Milky Way near Orion, with only silhouetted horizontal masses of distant clouds interrupting the base of its smooth tapered contours. “The Leonid display seemed to slow down by 4 A.M., although by the time I left as dawn began washing out the Zodiacal light it was still at a level of activity comparable to what I had seen three years previously. For a minute I drove very slowly on the deserted dirt road with only my parking lights on, leaning forward and looking up through my windshield at Leonids, savoring the novelty of deliberately looking for meteors while driving! Finally I have glimpsed a meteor storm. I will always remember the magic of that night..” We’ll end with Bob Kline’s comments: “This was by far the most spectacular meteor shower I have ever seen! Went to the Trona Pinnacles State Park way out in the Mojave Desert where the skies are very dark with my brother from Ridgecrest where we had totally clear skies with excellent transparency. The scene was much like being in a Bonestell painting with all those jagged spires pointing skyward. I took many different time exposures many with the pinnacles in the foreground. It was difficult to tell the meteor count per hour because there were so many over the entire sky. I estimate about 4000 to 5000 per hour. I watched the shower from 12:00 am to sunrise. The peak was about 3:00 am, although the exact "peak" was hard to estimate because they were fairly steady from about 1:30 to almost 4:00. Meteors could even be seen as late as a few minutes before sunrise. Just above the western horizon opposite the sunrise you could still see meteors! Some that would of been very bright at night could be seen fairly close to area of sunrise. This will probably be one of those once in a lifetime astronomical events never to be forgotten!” Not at least until next year!

Voyage II by Devy Wolfe