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Got up at 3:00AM CSST and drove out of Broken Hill about 4km to the North West, set my banana lounge up on a clay pan and was observing by 3:20AM CSST.
There was no cloud, the temp was a most pleasant 22C and the seeing was great with the stars being very steady almost to the horizon.
In the 90 minutes prior to twilight I recorded:
5 Leonid meteors, 3 of which were very bright at least mag -4,
5 sporadic meteors,
1 Taurids meteor,
The Taurids meteor was the highlight, very slow moving and extremely bright, so bright that even though I was concentrating on the quadrant of the sky in the direction of Leo, from my semi prone position on my banana lounge this meteor captured my attention, even though it was behind me.
I must say that I really didn't expect much more from the Leonid's, there is little chance of recording storm levels for at least 100 years.
Back in 2001 I recorded Leonid's data for the IMO and Rob McNaught, now that was a storm. Following mentions that there maybe semi storm levels this year I dug up my spreadsheet from 2001 with my data.
I had a talking countdown timer set 5 mins that continually reset and recorded my observation in a spreadsheet as set out by the IMO procedure. I later, used this data in a project when doing my degree at Swinburne University.
There were two peaks predicted by Rob McNaught & Dave Asher at 17:21UTC & 18:09UTC.
I have attached my data to demonstrate what a "Storm" delivered.
Regards
Trevor
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