July 16/17 Meteors

[NOTE: Originally I posted this with the wrong dates (I was off by 1 day). The dates have been corrected.]

Bob continues to detect impressive numbers of meteors with his camera system in Sand Diego. Last night he even recorded 4 possible Perseids even though that shower doesn’t peak for almost a month. From his notes: “There were occasional high clouds during the evening hours. The clouds increased during the morning hours yet I still managed to record 42 meteors.”

Here in Tucson, last night saw a nice complex of thunderstorms roll through during the late evening. With all of the rain and lightning, I decided to keep the cameras off and unplugged. Not sure tonight will be much better with another round of storms forecast for tonight. Not to mention the sky today is about as murky as it gets in Tucson with a soupy mix of humidity, clouds and forest fire smoke.

BTW, one of the fires, the San Juan fire, is burning on the slopes of Kitt Peak. As a result all of the astronomical facilities on KP have been evacuated. This doesn’t necessarily mean the scopes are in danger, it is probably a “just in case” safety measure. Plus you can’t get too much observing done through smoke anyway.

Obs  Date (UT)   TotTime TOT SPO ANT CAP SDA PAU PER
TUS  2009-07-17  00h 00m  Clouds
SDG  2009-07-17  06h 42m  42  30  6   1   1   0   4

TUS – Camera in Tucson operated by Carl Hergenrother
SDG – Camera in San Diego operated by Bob Lunsford
TotTime – Total amount of time each camera looked for meteors
TOT – Total number of meteors detected
SPO – Sporadics (meteors not affiliated with any particular meteor shower)
ANT – Antihelions
CAP – Alpha Capricornids
SDA – Southern Delta Aquariids
PAU – Piscids Australids
PER – Perseids