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Leonid Meteor Earlier This Week

The clouds were too thick and the chance of rain was too high for me to leave my camera out last night, but earlier this week when I was looking for Taurid meteors I caught this Leonid meteor as well.  Although the generally recognized peak of the shower was a few hours ago, the International Meteor Organization notes that there may be a second peak of activity in 2-3 days:

"The most recent perihelion passage of the Leonids' parent comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, in 1998 may be nearly 15 years ago now, but the shower's activity has continued to be fascinatingly variable from year to year recently. This year seems unlikely to produce enhanced rates, but there may be more than one peak. Apart from the nodal timing above, Mikhail Maslov has suggested that there could be a peak with ZHRs of ∼ 5—10 at 21h UT on November 17, followed by another increase to ZHRs of ∼ 10—15, probably of below-average brightness meteors, on November 20, at ∼ 06h UT (the latter due to the 1400 AD dust-trail)." 

"ZHRs for the nodal peak are liable to be "normal", so probably about 15±5. November's waxing Moon is excellent news for either date, as it will set before or soon after the time the Leonid radiant first becomes usefully-observable, by local midnight or so north of the equator, afterwards for places further south. All observing methods can be employed. While these potential maximum timings do not exclude all others, if they prove correct, the two November 17 ones would be best-detectable from North American, and Middle East to Asian longitudes respectively, while that on November 20 would be similarly available from places between eastern North America east to extreme western North African longitudes."

Here on the West Coast of North America, if the skies are clear I'll try to capture that second peak as the radiant point of the shower is rising above the horizon to the East, in the 10 pm – midnight time frame.

Early Leonid Meteor

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54 thoughts on “Leonid Meteor Earlier This Week”

  4. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    +Tereza P I use an external timer (intervalometer) to capture hundreds of 30 second exposures over the course of several hours, as described in my blog entry "Producing Milky Way Images":
    http://activesole.blogspot.com/search?q=Milky+Way
    As that article describes in more detail, I use a lens with a very wide focal length to see a lot of the sky, and the camera's shutter is open most of the night, so many of the meteors are captured in photos.  I can even put those hundreds of photos together to make time-lapse movies from them: 
    Perseid Meteor Shower
    http://youtu.be/vroLnrBhbmk?hd=1
    (Best viewed 720p quality, full screen.)

  11. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    It doesn't have to be expensive +Tereza P.  You could use most DSLR cameras from the last 6 years (a used Canon XTi is worth about $200). The older and less expensive ones you'd want to raise the ISO to 1600, but not much higher due to noise.  Newer cameras might shoot comfortably at ISO 3200 (Canon T3i or Nikon D7000 for example), or ISO 6400 (Canon 5D mark II, Nikon D600) or higher.  For lenses you could start with a standard 50mm f/1.8 (about $100).  You wouldn't get a very wide view, especially on a less expensive crop sensor DSLR camera, but you could capture sharp and well exposed images of the night sky.  Better would be a 24mm f/1.4 lens for a crop sensor camera, but those are over $1000 new, and 24mm still reduces to close to 40mm on a crop sensor.  When budget is not an issue, ideally a full frame camera (such as Canon 6D or Nikon D600) would be combined with a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, to get a full 16mm view of the sky.

  14. Mike Davey
    Reply

    +Tereza P Not terribly expensive for taking pictures of meteor showers, you can do this with a tripod, camera and intervalometer. Some inexpensive Canon cameras can be used with CHDK, an add on software that's free on the web and lets you take pictures at set intervals (intervalometer). Some of them do, some don't, I am not sure of their suitability for taking pictures of meteor showers. It depends (I think) on their longest shutter time. Longer is better. Then you might want options like noise reduction. If you have a canon camera I suggest you look into CHDK no matter what. It's a great software enhancement.

    Otherwise you can buy an intervalometer on Ebay (with suitable adapter for the camera) for quite reasonable prices. The camera is the priciest part, but even then older lower end digital SLR's can be purchased second hand.

    You can also buy cameras for astronomy and telescopes, binoculars, it can get expensive, but you can get a decent pair of binoculars for $100 these days. Intro level telescopes for $150 (US), so i guess "inexpensive" is in the eye of they buyer.

    I'm not an expert or even a semi knowledgeable beginner, so if you decide to go for it I suggest you check all my information with someone who actually knows something. At least check with someone who is more knowledgeable then me.

    Good luck!

  18. Mike Davey
    Reply

    Nice catch Jeff!
    I bought an intervalometer to do this, but the last three nights have been raining and cloudy. 🙁
    BTW, it cost me about $15 on Ebay, and they sell adapters for almost any camera that has the capability to use intervalometers. If you have a second or third camera.

  22. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Which intervalometer did you get +Mike Davey?  I've seen people using ones with the Aputure brand which seem to copy the Canon features closely for under $30, but I've also had a customer show up with one from that company that wasn't working.

  28. Mike Davey
    Reply

    The intervalometer I got has no trademarks at all on it, +Jeff Sullivan . It says on the back "Timer Remote Switch RST-7001" I haven't had any problems, other then when I first plugged it into my Olympus E-PM1 the camera went dead and I couldn't get it working again. I had the camera 15 days, one day past it's return period. Then I realized the battery had just gone flat at the same time. Whew. (Picture me hitting myself on the forehead)

    The instructions are only passable, confusing and poorly arranged. I mostly figured it out by playing with it. Of course the failure to understand them could be me.

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