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| This year's Leonid meteor shower won't be easy to forget, after an alert from a friend of mine from l'Observatoire de Paris some months about this year's leonid activity, I rushed to the world wide web to prepare myself and my team as usual to see some of the wonders above our so clear night in Lebanon. I checked the International Meteor Organization website to obtain some deep knowledge on what will happen, and I felt we should be fully prepared this year cause we're in a top list of contries that will witness the 2002 Leonid Meteor shower (LMS). Lebanon is on the eastern coast of the mediteranean sea. |
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Then I moved to the Leonid multi-instrument Aircraft campain at http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov . It took me several days to study the summary of 2002 Leonid storm forecasts made by Jenniskens (August), Asher/McNaught (October) and Vaubaillon/Colas (October), using the leonid MAC flux estimator at http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html This java applet calculates the expected leonid meteor storm rate from your location under different observing conditions based on the predictions by Peter Jenniskens. After all, I studied the curve at the coordinates 33°54' N and 35°28' E. Well, we are at a critical state,
and this is very favorable for this observation on November 19th:
As you can notice, we have this 22 minutes between the moonset and the civil twilight, and "wow", the peak is in between. I was wondering how lucky we are, and how the light pollution was at its minimum , it seemed that Leonid had smiled to us, and It expecting what will happen also. At the night of the event (18-19), my friends were fully prepared: the right clothes, full jeep prepared. I was all the beginning of that night revising my calculations, while another part of the team was waiting there filling the data collection forms that we have sent to IMO. My heart was pumping fast, and I was also viewing on my Pc Earth live from lots of satellites such as ARABSAT 3A that was observing the region from 35781 km above the Middle East, and I noticed that the twilight zone will appear in about one hour and a half. I left my caculations behind, moved with two of my friends in the jeep, we were on the coast in Beirut, driving in a race with time: no talking, thinking of the future, and seeing the moon above the sea as it turned to orange, it was an astonishing color reflected by the sea. On our road to Broumana, I was looking up to the sky, nothing was happening, I realized that because of the great slope that the curve has that moment: like the head of the nail, if we move far from the peak, we will lose lots of meteors to see. After about 1 hour we arrived, we were alsoguided by Venus that was right above east, my friends in the car were taking photographs of the moon at its set. It is now around 05:00, we joined the rest of the team, I asked them about the activity, it was very normal. It is 05:15, it is very calm, the fresh air of the last half hour of the night, everyone was lying on his back, looking into Leo, Jupiter near it, shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhtttttt. Total silence, minimum light pollution, I saidto myself: "come on, pls", some moment of silence, well..., tha's it, a very fast shooting star has traveled half the sky at an unimaginable speed, two, three, we wre unable tocount because of their number, wow, a fireball, then, after 2 mns, no one, a moment, another crazy activity, wahooo, the meteors were traveling so far, and a last third crazy activity. |
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After about half a crazy hour, the light emited from the sun was increasing continuously, the meteors we see now have nicest magnitude, I was wondering how they can be seen without any light pollution. At 06:00, we gathered every equipment,
it is so wonderful to look at some phenomenon that maybe has brought
life to earth, very interesting. We moved after it to the Arbaniyeh
station in the Lebanese mountains. The station contains a huge satellite
dish of 32 meters in diameter. After some talks withy the staff
there, they told us that at 02:00 approximately, tere was somekind
of perturbations and interference with the waves received by the
satellite dishes. I was wondering how Leonid 2002 had created
such impact on us. Special thanx to SPACE.COM that
allows us to gather such information, to help us publish our observation. Alain J. Khayat, team leader. Engineering student, Lebanon. |
Explanation: This lovely view from northern Spain, at Cape Creus on the easternmost point of the Iberian peninsula, looks out across the Mediteranean and up into the stream of the 2002 Leonid meteor shower. The picture is a composite of thirty separate one minute exposures taken through a fisheye lens near the Leonids' first peak, about 4:00 Universal Time on November 19. Over 70 leonid meteors are visible here, some seen nearly head on, with bright Jupiter positioned just to the right of the shower's radiant in Leo. Perched on the moonlit rocks at the bottom right, the photographers' dog seems to be watching the on going celestial display and adds a surreal visual element to the scene. Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado and Isabel Graboleda |
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Site Manager:
Alain Khayat |
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