Sept 9/10 to 14/15 Meteors

For most of the past week, clouds and a hazy sky has kept meteor rates low. This has all changed over the last 2 nights as the summer moisture has been shunted to the southeast. The now much more transparent sky is producing a large increase in the number of detectable meteors.

I’m not sure why last night produced 42 meteors. There seems to be no reason for the large numbers since they were mostly Sporadics and not associated with each other. They were also rather faint so perhaps the darker sky is just allowing my cameras to go deeper.

There has been some nice activity from near the September Perseid radiant. I’m not sure if these really are Sept Perseids. Sirko Molau’s recent analysis of video data taken by dozens of video cameras (including my own) suggests that the Perseus/Auriga region of the sky is riddled with minor showers during the month of September. His paper does not go into too much detail and he states that situation requires further work.

Obs Date (UT)   TotTime  TOT SPO ANT SPE
TUS 2009-09-15  09h 59m   42  35  2   5
TUS 2009-09-14  06h 11m   23  18  1   4
TUS 2009-09-13  04h 16m   10  7   0   3
TUS 2009-09-12  09h 36m   6   5   1   0
TUS 2009-09-11  08h 36m   13  12  0   1
TUS 2009-09-10  09h 48m   9   6   0   3

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
SPE – September Perseids