[thechat] world info on Leonid shower and observing hints
Chris Spruck
cspruck at mindspring.com
Wed Nov 14 01:13:05 CST 2001
http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html has a form with some prelisted
cities from around the world or you can enter your latitude and longitude
for determining the peak time for your location. Remember to put a red
filter of some kind (paper, plastic, etc.) over a flashlight or you'll ruin
your night vision, which takes 30-45 minutes to restore to your maximum
adaptation.
I'd be interested in hearing peoples' experiences with this shower,
especially if my view isn't good. As a kid, I spent countless nights,
staying out all night for all sorts of obscure, minor showers. I've seen
meteors in every color of the rainbow, seen a few break into several pieces
and keep going briefly, seen a couple last from horizon to horizon, saw one
skip like a stone on water, and even heard one once. Pretty amazing for
simple dust.
While you're watching for meteors, you stand a fair chance of catching
satellites - if you see something pretty dim, moving pretty slowly in
predominantly north-south or east-west paths, it's probably a satellite.
Sometimes you'll see them gradually get brighter and dimmer, which means
they're rotating and reflecting sunlight off different parts. The best
chance to see them is shortly after sunset or shortly before sunrise -
they'll be brighter due to sunlight refracting through the atmosphere, even
though the sun would still be below your horizon.
There's lots of cool stuff you can see with binoculars, so I highly
recommend taking them out if you have some, although you'll almost never
catch a meteor using them. One more tip and I'm done - if you're trying to
look at something dim like a nebula or galactic cluster, don't look
straight at it, but use your peripheral vision. The rods and cones in your
retina handle light differently - the cones, more concentrated in the
center of your eye, are more color sensitive in brighter light and the
rods, found more in the periphery of the retina, are better for colorless
vision in dimmer light (which is why everything looks mostly black and
white if you're walking around in just moonlight). Thus, you see
astronomical objects better out of the corner of your eye.
Hope this is useful or was interesting!
Chris
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