The Leonid Meteor Storm of 2001

I didn't need to see the poor forecast Saturday morning to realize that Park City residents would not be viewing the meteor shower. One look out the window was all it took. The clouds which were due that evening couldn't wait. They covered the sky from end to end. Briefly I hoped they'd disappear, then reality set in. It was time for Plan B. 

Plan B entailed packing up the car and driving as far south as necessary to be assured clear skies. We ended up at a campground about 15 miles north of St. George, UT. Note that this was over 300 miles from Park City. Anyway... we arrived in the dark, setup camp (of course this included a telescope) and had dinner. By the time we were ready to view, it was about 9:00pm. As I was heading towards the truck for the last time, I was treated to a beautiful Leonid warm-up. This was gonna be a good night. As I sat myself down for a sampling of the skies, we were already watching 15-20 meteors per hour. This is a typical Leonid PEAK level. This was gonna be a really good night. I decided to do a little observing while waiting for the BIG show. I toured a handful of Messier objects (M42, M31, M33) under some of the darkest, clearest skies anywhere. I'd put these at mag 6 skies easily. Saturn and Jupiter looked awesome. All of a sudden... there was a flash from and exploding Leonid! Ok... time to get back to the Leonids. Meteor rates increased steadily throughout the night. By midnight, we eclipsed the 100 mph mark with no letup in sight. Soon we were seeing several meteors simultaneously. Wow! Meteor activity peaked between 2:30 and 3:30am. At times you'd see 6 or 8 meteors striking across the sky. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The final (estimated) tally put meteor totals near 1000 meteors per hour. 

This turned out to be a really good night. The following images are some of my favorites from the web... and a couple of mine.

Ok, lets start things off with the beauty by Farley Bridges of Livingston, LA. This rainbow Leonid was captured using a12 second exposure @ f/1.8 taken with tripod mounted Canon F-1 w/ 50mm lens. Pretty sweet... Right through the middle of Orion.

Next up is another fine meteor captured by Alan Stankevitz near Nashville, TN. According to Stankevitz, "The ionized train from this meteor persisted for more than 20 minutes; it expanded in size and moved south during that time."

Moving on we've got a handful of meteors captured by David Johnson of Gold Bar WA. In this shot, David has captured 1 bright meteor and 3 others all emanating from the constellation Leo.

Well... you knew I had to stick a couple of my own in. While they're no match for the previous images, they're my small contribution to this whole event. This image captures a meteor streaking through Canis Major. Orion is located to the upper right.

This is another of my meteors. This was about a 10 minute exposure centered on Polaris. Notice the rotation of the stars around Polaris. The meteor was captured as it streaked through the Big Dipper.