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Jaw-dropping Leonids
On Nov. 18, 2001, sky watchers somewhere will see a dazzling storm of Leonid meteors.
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November 8, 2001
I'll never forget the night of November 17, 1998. It was cold outside my mountain home at 9000 ft. The skies were crystal clear. And it was very dark.
That is, except for the fireballs.
I was sky watching with a friend, both of us experienced astronomers. Nevertheless, we stared upwards like novices, slack-jawed, as if we had never seen the sky before.
We were witnessing the annual Leonid meteor
shower. But these were no ordinary Leonids. They were bright, vivid, shadow-casting fireballs. Every five minutes or so we saw one as bright as Venus, and a fair number would have outshined a Full Moon. Some of the most startling left behind glowing trails of debris that lingered in the sky, twisting and turning as they were sheared by high-altitude winds.
A wide angle view of Leonid fireballs on November 17, 1998.
Photo Credit: Juraj Toth.
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It was unforgettable.
In years since I've heard sky watchers refer to that event as the "1998 Leonid fireball storm." But it wasn't really a storm at all. Meteor rates that night never exceeded a few hundred shooting stars per hour. "We define a meteor storm to be times when observers can see 1000 or more per hour," says Bill Cooke from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "The Leonids of '98 -- as spectacular as they were -- were not a full-fledged storm."
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Cheers,
Dan
Jaw-dropping Leonids . . .