Perseids 2020

[Marc R. O'Leary]

I didn't bother going camping. Fire restrictions everywhere, and since I live well east of metro, I still have a good view. I'm on vacation this week, so I posted up in the backyard 4 days in a row. Saturday was best until peak. Despite the smoke and moon, managed to see quite a few. Peak saw a bunch of long trails leaving beautiful colorful tails all topped off by a bomb of a fireball around 3am that lit up the whole area.

No camera this year. I've decided I'd rather watch and enjoy live than watching through a screen and managing batteries and all that nonsense.

All that being said, decent outcome. Definitely not the best I've seen by a long shot, but conditions what they were it was most definitely worth the late nights.

Bring on the Geminids and new moon conditions!

 

[Jeff Duda]

Definitely not the best I've seen by a long shot, but conditions what they were it was most definitely worth the late nights.

Bring on the Geminids and new moon conditions!

I would agree that this wasn't the best Perseid show I have ever seen, nor the best meteor shower overall. In fact, it has been quite some time since I saw a really good Perseid shower (sometime in the 90s). The last few years seemed to have underperformed. But I would give this year credit for at least having a few really big ones.

For me it's going to take a lot to top the 2017 Orionid shower that I saw from rural Oklahoma. While a lot of them were pretty faint, the sheer frequency of them blew my mind. They were also even more consistent in travel, color, and length than the Perseids, plus they were mixed with some other kind of shower that was brighter and longer in which the meteors were uniformly a different color and going a different direction. This show was so good I even was still seeing meteors through the light pollution in the south OKC metro area after I got home and walking into my apartment!

 

[James K]

I went out last night, but gave up & went back in after a bit over 15 minutes...
There was less smoke than the night before, but more clouds, so not much open/viewable sky.
At that point I figured tonight might be a possibility...but the smoke was deff thicker today (smelled like campfire too, even noticed it a bit inside at work a couple timed during the day)... so won't bother going out & looking, since I know ther'll be nothing to see.

I figure there is still camping on Sat night where I should be far enough south to be out from under the smoke plume, assuming wind pattern stays the same. I know campfire or anything with all the fire restrictions (but its been that way even since the 1st time we went back in june).

 

[Jeff House]

I didn't have great luck Wednesday morning 4am. Figured after the nocturnal pee break, go outside and check, since skies were clear with good vis. No effort to get rural, just IMBY. I saw one after about 20 minutes. It was short-track but decent brightness (probably fairly direct angle). However I did enjoy just star gazing. As Orion came up I'm thinking, yeah the hot humid days of summer won't last forever. Cool season is coming...

Been cloudy most nights here this week, but at least we got the peak night clear. Might try this weekend. Possible moon light impacted the show midweek. While past peak, the Moon will be less disruptive this weekend.

I've had better luck while doing other star gazing, comet watching, or using the telescope evenings. Just a few weeks ago with Comet NEOWISE we had a long-track grazer. Not quite a fireball but it was a good one. Evenings favor grazers at indirect angles, I suppose fewer but sometimes quite nice. I've seen 3 really good meteors, and none of them were during advertised showers.

That said, we should just enjoy being out under the sky. Really the regular stars are always incredible esp. from a dark sky. I can also get lost in the Milky Way and some of the star clusters out evenings this time of year.

 

[Jeremy Perez]

One of those annoying composite shots — but was compelled to mash 5.5 hrs of meteors into a single image. Like the cat has been clawing at the furniture. 101 Perseids in there along with 22 sporadics from 11:10PM to 4:40AM MST/0610-1140Z.



The image/star field chosen as the background was based on the shot that contains the bright fireball above and to the right of the San Francisco Peaks while the sky and foreground were illuminated by moonlight. All other meteors were carefully de-rotated, re-aligned and tone/color corrected to this base star field to show the abundance of Perseids tracing to their radiant and to show which meteors were sporadic or part of another ongoing shower.

 

[James K]

Cool picture @Jeremy Perez

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That said, we should just enjoy being out under the sky. Really the regular stars are always incredible esp. from a dark sky. I can also get lost in the Milky Way and some of the star clusters out evenings this time of year.

I can say I did enjoy just sitting out up there on the roof Wed night. Yeah I only saw one meteor, and there really isn't much to see here star-wize even on a clear night, but...the temperature was perfect, the tree-crickets were out chirping away (yeah there was the constant highway-traffic in the background too which detracts from things), but overall it was "just one of those nice late summer nights" that are so great to be outside in.

When it comes to something like camping, one of the best parts is looking up at the star-filled night sky!

 

[James K]

When camping yesterday, at first I wasn't sure if I'd see anything because it got fully cloudy in the evening, plus there was the smoke...but after dark the clouds fully cleared out, along with some of the smoke (passage of a weak coldfront to thank for that). So made for a pretty clear view

Ended up seeing a few meteors, including a nicer one one that lasted a just bit longer.
(I could see some flashes from lightning that had to be way south of me. which was also the direction I saw the one meteor in (it went from E to W))
Overall, it was pretty much a perfect saturday-night to go camping.

Just as an experiment I put the camera on a tripod, pointed it at the milkyway & snapped off multiple shots...I doubt I got anything other than 'black', but I plan to download Sequator & run them through that to see what happens.