1257 meteors in 1.5 hour! Wow!

2001/11/17 afternoon. Forecast is clear for tonight. Unusual for Pittsburgh! Excited.

7:00pm EST. Dense fog starts to form outside. Wagman observatory site is still clear. AAAP mailing list is filled with all kinds of predictions.

11:00pm. Wagman is reportedly totally fogged in. Decide to drive 100 miles north to Oil Region Astronomical Society observatory.

Oil Region Astronomical Society observatory

1:30am. Driving in fog. At times the visibility is less than a few yards, and it's kind of scary to look at the light beam of your own headlight. As we slowly approached Grove city, fog started to break. As soon as we were in the first fog 'gap', my wife immediately saw 2 Leonids. That was really good news, though a few seconds later we were surrounded by fog again. From Grove city to Franklin, the sky was generally clear. Even I was driving, I couldn't help but noticed about 10 meteors which fell down almost directly above horizon in front of me. Franklin was totally fogged in though, which made us worried for a while. But ORAS was so clear!

Driving in fog

4:00am. Set up chairs, sleep bags, tripods, camcorder. Saw a purple white fireball -- an apparent sporadic -- as bright as mag -4, with a double (parallel) tail. Very cold, later sleep bags and tripod were covered with frost and thin ice.

Chair and sleep bag

4:19am to 6:07am. Counting and video taping. In 1 hour 31 minutes 45 seconds effective observation time (i.e. excluding hot chocolate break and the like :-) I counted 1244 Leonids and 13 sporadics. That translates into 4.4 seconds per meteor. I successfully captured 68 meteors on video with my home camcorder, far exceeding my expectation. Some clips in MPEG format: (1) Meteors left trails (2) Meteors over horizon (3) Meteors in Orion (4) Leo, Jupiter, Orion

4:43am. A fireball left a persistent trail in the sky. I draw the following sketches from memory. The stars are Orion and Taurus, Saturn. The trail lasted for more than 5 minutes.

Immediately after the meteor, the trail is straight.

30 seconds later, it starts to bend.

1 minute later, it bends into a 'V'.

1 minute 30 seconds later, the two arms fold together.

5:10am. Saw a somewhat triangle shaped wedge light (yellowish compared to the winter milky way) before twilight. From horizon it tilted a little to the right and ended in the middle of the constellation Leo. It was actually brighter than the winter milky way. Could this be the Zodiacal light? The following sketch is drawn on the second day, so it may not be totally accurate but I think I've reconstructed it the best I can.

Zodiacal light sketch

morning. Leonids were still falling under twilight. Drove passed the Dairy Queen shop with an Apollo space capsule (left), returned to the still foggy Pittsburgh (right).

Apollo space capsule

City still foggy

Report to IMO. You like numbers don't you. Here you go.

International Meteor Organization (IMO) Visual Observing Form - Summary Report

Day:18 Month:11 Year:2001 Begin: 9h19m UT End: 11h07m

Location long. -79.7832947 latit. 41.4713211 IMO code:_______

Site: Oil Region Observatory, Oil City, PA Country: USA

Observer: Xiaojin Zhu IMO code: ZHUXI

Showers: Leonids

Comments:

1. counting by dictating to videotape.

2. no time to dictate magnitude of each meteor. roughly equal number of bright and dim ones.

3. twilight started during the last row.

Here is a more detailed data file , where each Leonid is accurate to a second. It's the second time I go over the tape, and the count is slightly different.