Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Poll- How Many did you see ?

[gaa_ian]

After a bit more research on this one I have read that the peak ZHR for the southern Hemisphere could be as high as 70/hr.
This Poll is for the mornings of the 5th and 6th of May Only, vote for how many you saw and leave your comments on the experience of the Meteor Shower.
The hour can be any sequential hour EG: 4:20 to 5:20 am.
Happy Meteor hunting !

OK ... poll is now active.
If tomorrow or Tuesday morning is all you can do, record your sightings for then.
If it is both mornings take your best hour and enter that in the poll.
In any case, post your comment in here as you go.
Click on the "Your Country" box if you are in the "Northern Hemisphere" and leave a comment.
(I am still getting the hang of setting up a Poll !)

Heres to clear skies for you all !

[gaa_ian]

OK... I will start the ball rolling.
Went out with fellow GAA club member "Notch" this morning and with a dark North Eastern sky vantage point. Looking out over the Arafura Sea from 4:35 to 5:35 am we had a good setting.
It was Amazing to see just how bright the Zodiacal light gets !
At one point it seemed to outshine the light dome from Nhulunbuy.

As usual the Meteors came in bursts with 3 or 4 in a minute.
One sporadic was very impressive, traveling from south to north at the zenith.
It was as bright as a welding flash (or so it seemed to my dark adapted eyes) and left a smoking train that persisted for at least 30 seconds :eyepop:

Anyhow at 5:35am the final count was 45 confirmed Eta Aquarids :thumbsup:
Looking forward to tomorrow morning and what that might bring.

What did you see ?

[h0ughy]

wow, thats a great count. it was a brisk morning here (4 degrees) and I admit i only looked for 20 min, all I saw was 7 - but i wasnt concentraiting as my son came to the door (heard me get up) and had to put him back to bed, where i followed.... Sorry?

[gaa_ian]

Good on you for having a go Houghy ....
We had to brave a morning temp of ......... :whistle: 20deg ;)

[AlexN]

I saw a few last night at around 3.30 - 4am... perhaps 15 in that 30 minute period... then I went off to bed....

I'll be getting up at 3am tomorrow and heading out with the scope and bino's... might even take a few 30sec images with a dslr to see if it catches any streaks...

[gaa_ian]

Good on you Alex ... its a hard time of the morning to be up !
Hope you get a clear morning tomorrow

[AlexN]

We've had clear skies here for the past week!! fingers crossed it holds out one more night.

[Jen]

Its not looking good here in Victoria for a clear sky :sadeyes::mad2:
:windy:
but i will set my alarm for 4:30am just to have a peak :)

[MrB]

From a fairly light polluted back-yard view I counted 20 Eta's and 16 Sporadics between 4:30-5:30.
Three were Sirius-ly(:rolleyes:) bright and within seconds of each other.
One sporadic was not bright but pretty impressive as it travelled maybe 30 degrees in 3 seconds (slow compared to the Eta's) while leaving a nice trail.

I've never done this before, was pretty surprised how many occur at large distances from the radiant, like 80deg away.
I reasoned (correctly?) that they can occur anywhere up to 90deg from the radiant? I figured that would explain why the highest counts are at Zenith(ZHR) because you have 90deg from radiant in all directions... is that right?

Will be back out there tomorrow morning :D

EDIT:
For interest sake, the previous morning I counted 9 Eta's and 8 Sporadic's in the same time period (4:30-5:30), though a couple of those sporadics could have been Eta's.
Some time was lost when some thin high altitude cloud passed through.

[gaa_ian]

I think you are correct Mr B !
The higher the radiant is in the sky the more you will see.

[gaa_ian]

Had another look at the Eta's this morning ... not near as good as yesterday :shrug: .
It just goes to show that it is always best to observe the day before the predicted peak, as peak prediction is an in-exact science.
My final vote is for the 45/hr from yesterday morning.
Anyone Else ?

[Inmykombi]

The stars were calling me again early am.
So I just had to check out the Meteor shower and saw about 20 / hr.
Fast little blighters, some with a residual trail. mostly very short sharp ones, with only the occasional larger one.
All coming from the East travelling to West direction.
There may have been more but I have too many trees to see down low to the East.

Cheers.

[PCH]

Didn't see a damned thing unfortunately - although the sky seemed pretty clear :(

Cheers,

[programmer]

Zero here

[AlexN]

around 30 for the hour here... skies were absolutely beautiful! as has been said by others, most were small, and didn't leave trails.. there was however 3 great ones, that were very fast, and traveled quite a ways, leaving a nice yellowie orange train..

Was a good night of observing and a great morning shower.

[Outbackmanyep]

Hi Ian and peoples!

I got up and headed to Walcha Aerodrome this morning at 3:15am, sleeping bags and blankets in the back of the Hilux, i had a very INTERESTING morning! I took my Canon 400D and tripod, did some 2min 1min and 30sec exposures randomly. In the first 30 to 45 mins i saw 19 meteors, not counting sporadics, a few were mag 3-4. Very short lived but bright. In the following hour from 4:30 to 5:30 i saw 40, limiting magnitude for my location was 6.5, (6.9 using averted vision) Conditions were PERFECT! No clouds, all stars from zenith to about 15 degrees above horizon were pin-point sharp and steady, no haze, a few low level clouds on the horizon and thunderstorms i could see to the north and north-east along the coastal areas.
Now the interesting thing is that i saw a LOT of meteors that were actually pinpoint flashes IE: heading towards ME! One particular "train" (many meteors coming from same region) i saw 6 flashes in the space of about 30 seconds, NOT an aeroplane thats for sure, all heading towards me and came from the same spot in the sky, below the radiant about 4 degrees.
Most of the meteors i saw were very short lived, half a degree trails or less, with about 3 that were longish, about 2 degrees long and bright.

One more thing, i saw a few satellites, a HUGE (-4?) Iridium flare and one satellite that puzzled me, i watched it coming from south to north, it was about mag 4, and it flickered once, then three times then about 30 times really fast, like a fizzly sparkler, then it dimmed and it started doing it again and again until i lost sight of it.....anyone got any info on what satellite this could have been??

What a great night!
I'll check out my images and see if i can post some a little later if i find anything on them!!!!

Cheers!

[Outbackmanyep]

Heres 2 pics from this morning, i didn't record ANY meteors except 1 sporadic to the north-east, quite dull and uninteresting. The meteors were too quick and not bright enough to capture with 400D, but i tried! My other pics i scanned and had a nil result, but i will lighten them a little and check them a bit more thorough when i get a chance.

One pic is of the Zodiacal light from Walcha Aerodrome, and the 2nd is half the Iridium flare, the camera was pointing in the wrong direction when this happened, i had to scramble out of the sleeping bag to reach over (had shutter release cable on camera) to move the camera.

Cheers! :thumbsup:

[fringe_dweller]

been crook with a bad cold last coupla days, didnt dare push my luck by going out in the cold morning air :sad::sad::sad::sad: not that conditions were ideal anyway here, fairly cloudy mostly :sadeyes: oh well i live vicarously thru all your accounts

great and interesting reports tho everybody! onya's :thumbsup:
keep the meteorobs flame burning :)
sounds like a reasonable show for some, specially for Ian up north in the box seat!

I know what its like Chris, a friend and I once did the ETA's with a primitive hand guided set up wide field 28mm film, for 5 hours over two consecutive mornings, and got one puny ETA! lol, and many other times with tripods with a few showers, got zip mostly, they're very camera shy eh, you have to watch the fov of camera like a hawk, and stop the exposure soon as you see one in fov, or you will wash it out if you continue with exposure, (dunno if that still applies so much to digital tho?) being a shortlived light source however bright, unlike stars ect
. has to be a speccy show on to get good results sometimes lol

nice shots mate, that zodiacal light is great :thumbsup:

[fringe_dweller]

yep, one strict general rule for 'proper' submitted obs is that to qualify as a candidate or member of a shower, the start point of said meteor, is two and a half times the distance the meteor travelled in its path, from the radiant.

so if meteor travelled 30deg's in its path, its travelled path 'start' point is 75deg from radiant,
but radiants can be large in some cases, altho from memory the ETA radiant is only about 5 deg in diameter?, which is a common size, a couple of radiants are as large as ten or even 20deg more degrees in diameter, so that adds another factor to that rule.
but fireballs, earthgrazers and foreshortened paths from low radiant horizon perspective can be exceptions sometimes.
btw nice obs Mr B!

[Outbackmanyep]

Hi Kearn! Thanks for your kind words!
The first thing i noticed was "short and sweet" meteors, i then had a thoughtie that the camera/tripod shots weren't going to help, i gave it a shot, i guess you get burned once! lol But the Zodiacal light was very bright and i got a nice image of that, if im up to the task i'll go out again tomorrow morning and give it another go.

Im not one to get up early, we had -7 this morning!!!!!

Hope you will be able to go and have a squiz at W1 Boattini soon!


Cheers!

[Craig.a.c]

Didn't get to see any :( Was cloudy and kept raining off and on, can't complain about the rain though.

[gaa_ian]

Awesome guys !
Sounds like some great Obs, I am so glad I went out on Monday morning.
That was defiantly the best viewing.
Hope you are better soon Kearn !

[gaa_ian]

Had to go out for a look this morning .....
Well after getting up at 4am 2 mornings in a row I did not have much choice.
My Body clock made the decision for me !
The shower stream is still active with 4 bright meteors seen in the 15 minutes or so under the partly cloudy, moderately light polluted suburban skies where I could only see about 180 deg of the sky.
So I would say an average of 20/hr !

[Deeno]

Woke up around 4.40 this morning and ducked outside for a bit of a looksee and ended up counting 51 in the space of an hour or so.

Many looked as if they were coming straight on as they were points of light that would flare and quickly fade. Couple of good ones but, most were fairly short lived.

Good fun
Deeno

[gaa_ian]

Good on you Denno ..
You saw more this morning than I did, this morning !
Make sure you vote in the poll
Cheers
Ian

[Tammy Plotner]

Thanks for encouraging more readers to follow all meteor showers... Not just the ones that make a big showing.

Here is a great radio meteor result from Macedon Ranges Observatory (http://www.darksky.net.au/forum/showthread.php?t=487). It's great fun observing with friends around the world!

[gaa_ian]

Hi Tammy
Great to see you over here at Iceinspace
I love you work on universetoday !
I am going to make a point of posting more often on universetoday
Hope you got to see a few Eta Aquarids yourself
Cheers

[MrB]

I saw that too, caught it in my peripheral vision then nearly snapped my neck to view it directly. Was an awesome sight, much brighter than I've ever seen Venus.


Thanks for that fringe_dweller.
The reason I was so surprised, with it being my first meteor shower, I mistakenly thought that they all started at the radiant or not far from it. At first I wasn't including those that were at a large distance from the radiant in my count, a few were marked as sporadics.(on the 4th)
As I started to realise that they were all kinda lining up, a few more were marked as 'possibles', then the more I saw started me thinking about things (like the full disk of Earths atmos. would be sweeping them up and the radiant being the point that the earth is travelling towards in this part of it's orbit, the radiant will shift slightly each day as we move through the orbit, etc etc), things started dropping into place and came up with the 90deg from radiant thing.
Come to think of it I probably should've done a bit of reading-up about showers before-hand! :D
The 'possibles' count(on the 4th) got merged with the Eta count when I was convinced I'd seen enough distant Eta's.


I also went out on the 6th(Tues) between 4:10 and 5:55am, saw 18 Eta's, two of which were very good, 22 sporadics incl. one very bright one and a very very bright Satellite(see Outbackmanyep's post).
Like others I saw a few pinpoint ones at the radiant.

Wanted to go out on Wed 7th too but was clouded out.

Most enjoyable, looking forward to the Perseids, Orionids and other showers :)

[ykchia]

Hi folks:

Just joined...the group.

ETA AQuarids 2008 : I went to bed at 2 am on peak date May6 trusting my two video cameras sticking out my study window can do a better job - you can see the composite plots using 6mm and 25mm video lens and watec cameras there nightevents.blogspot.com (http://nightevents.blogspot.com).

You can find one bright May 4 ETA there in Sag as well. Hv not posted the video yet. *Posted here in youtube (http://nightevents.blogspot.com/2008/05/may-4-08-eta-aquarid-meteor.html)

Lastest this morning 9-May before i rush off to work - a quick browse indicated some (but lesser) level of ETAs still continue in early am hours for both cameras.

Cheers!

rgds
yKChia
Singapore ( same longitude as folks in Perth?)

[Jen]

none there were clouds everywhere in victoria

:sadeyes::mad2::doh:

:cloudy:

:mad:

[Blue Skies]

Yes, I think you are, or very close to, at least.