Perseid Meteor Shower 2009

[brianb]

Guess what...it's cloudy here again despite the TV forecast giving clear spells tonight.

Yup, they've cursed us. 6/8 broken stratocumulus with thick altostratus filling in the gaps.

Mind you, August always is bad.

[Tyler]

Hope you guys get a break in those clouds! Might go out again tonight (charging batteries and preparing this time lol) for star trails and maybe I get lucky and a fireball goes through the frame. Unlikely? very much so.

Clear Skies

[martinastro]

I'm just in from a session. Had clear skies with high level cloud, activity is very good, seen 51 meteors so far. Quite cloudy now though.

Go for it Tyler 

[Tyler]

Glad to hear you got to see some Martin! I'll probably head out for a couple hour session, clouds look to come in around midnight

[Big Dipper]

Some very nice shots here - especially yours, Tyler.

Congratulations also on your meteor marathon - 217 meteors in one sitting is extremely impressive.

Martin - 51 meteors is excellent. This is by far the most I've seen reported as having been clocked from a UK observer - well done!

Tonight has been solid cloud & rain. However Tues into Wed gave a good sky - at least it could have been had it not been for that bright light rising in the east & drowning everything out! 
I didn't really start observing til gone midnight once the rowdy mob next door had pissed off back indoors (part of the appeal of observing the night sky for me is the  relative silence which goes with it which IMO greatly adds to the mood of the occasion). By this time, the Moon was already high enough to drown out much of the sky! However, I did take some comfort in the fact that I'd set up my AstroTrac an hour or so before to take back-to-back exposures with a 50mm lens at an area of sky above Cassiopeia. That was until I checked the DSLR preview screen and found it as bright as day - utterly overwhelmed with light pollution/Moonlight!!

That's when I checked everything & found that for some inexplicable reason I had set the timer to take an hour long exposure instead of a minute! Worse still, I hadn't actually started the AT tracking either!!

And no, I wasn't drunk or anything - a case of old age & dry rot as my Gran used to say!

Anyway I kept watch on & off til about 2.30am when it began to cloud over a bit. During that time I only saw one faint meteor (nothing to write home about) which I thought was pretty disappointing for the night before the peak.

Anyway, great to hear some of the success stories elsewhere. A great read IMO.

[jgs001]

Lovely shots guys, clouded out here too last night... despite it looking promising at around 1800...

[brianb]

More or less greyed out here. Kept checking until 0100 as there were small breaks in the SC overcast though the transparency was poor in these with a ZLM of around 2.5 ... in one check I saw a bright (-4) Perseid streaking through the N Hercules region. The breaks were filling in gradually and by 1am it was very difficult even to see which direction the Moon was shining from so gave up.

[Tyler]

56 was the count here tonight, finally after 273 meteors I got one in the frame, but it's still crappy lol. Clouded out for my planned moonlit landscape star trails and that ended my session. So 56 in 2.5 hours. Did a star trail stack while hoping for a fireball to go through. No fireballs for the entire shower! Saw probably 70 earthgrazers the last two nights though.





Got a little "bored" later...LOL got one of the e's backwards.

[jgs001]

Nicely done Tyler

[Paul]

Some fabulous shots there - Tyler, I love the torchwork, great job!

A group of us from the IAA visited a dark site away from the lights of Belfast awaiting that magical time between the Sun going down and the Moon coming up. The clouds eventually cleared away too and within the space of 90 mins I saw 15 Perseids and a couple of sporadics - Jude saw 24 but I was attending to the camera! We saw a few more after we got home, but by then the clouds were getting the better of the night.

Here's my snaps!

Perseid #1 2258 BST


Perseid #2 2259 BST


Widefield of Milky Way in Cygnus - stack of 6 x 30secs @ f4 ISO 1600


Excellent night, great craic!

[John9929]

Great shots guys......all of them!

I got 23 from 00:00 - 2:30 when it clouded over unfortunately none on camera. Some nice bright ones at that including one at the zenith probebly -3. Seen a lovely long slow one over in the W but it was not a Perseid (wrong direction). I know that site you were at Paul, unfortunately I had no lift and I don't tend to drive far at night, it's a great site though and their events are always very good.

Tyler, congrats.....I see you have taken over from me on spaceweather.com

[rjgjr]

Great shots and reports everyone. At the stroke of midnight it was foggy and drizzley, so I went to bed. Woke up at 6am and it was crystal clear, who knows what I missed? probably not much. Good job everyone!!

[Tyler]

Thanks Paul and John. Paul, very impressive to not only get 1 meteor on camera but TWO! incredible since you only saw 15! That first one is a beautiful green to orange hue, must have been a bright one! Great work. Glad to hear that almost everyone at least got a few.

John - thanks, I've never gotten a whole "story" of my own on there.