Sunday, January 18, 2009
What Meteor Showers to Watch
It's always a bit difficult to get a feel for what meteor shower rates are, and whether its worth watching.However, this graph of average rates for Meteor showers from the Cloudbait Observatory gives you a great visual comparison. It won't quite translate to the Southern Hemisphere (where the Perseid radiant never comes above the horizon for example, so our rates are negligible), and of course having a full Moon next to the radiant really messes up meteor viewing.
One way to get around the Southern Hemisphere/Moon phase problem is to use NASA's fluxtimator, which will estimate the number of meteors you will see for a given shower at your location. However, it seems to be broken for the 2009 Leonids (other showers work well though, try the 4 Geminid entry for the night of December 13-14).
One way to get around the Southern Hemisphere/Moon phase problem is to use NASA's fluxtimator, which will estimate the number of meteors you will see for a given shower at your location. However, it seems to be broken for the 2009 Leonids (other showers work well though, try the 4 Geminid entry for the night of December 13-14).
Labels: Meteors
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 8:17 am 
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This year Leonids could be very interesting. We have discussed on our astronomy forum in Slovenia some predictions about ZHR 1000+. But the radiant will be low here at MAX, so the Russia would be a good destination for us.
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# posted by 
: 9:49 pm
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