Oct 17-24 Meteors

The past week witnessed the annual peak of the Orionid meteor shower. The Orionids are the result of dust created by Comet Halley over 2000-3000 years ago. Visual observers recorded peak ZHRs of only 20-25 meteors per hour. This is less than the peak from the last three years with rates of 30-50 per hour and a huge step down from 2007 when rates as high as 70 per hour were seen.

Unfortunately I missed most of the shower. For three nights was observing some of the objects that create meteor showers rather than the shower itself. The plan was to leave my meteor camera in auto mode but things didn’t work out that way. As a result my system missed three nights of the Orionid peak. I’ll have to figure out how to prevent this in the future.

Obs  Date(UT)      Time    TOT SPO NTA STA ORI TUM EGE LMI
TUS  2011-10-24   10h 41m   66  21  2   3   38  -   2   0
TUS  2011-10-23   10h 05m   66  17  2   3   43  -   0   1
TUS  2011-10-22   10h 07m   76  18  4   3   48  -   1   2
TUS  2011-10-21   00h 00m   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -
TUS  2011-10-20   00h 00m   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -
TUS  2011-10-19   00h 00m   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -
TUS  2011-10-18   10h 07m   48  18  2   5   20  1   2   -
TUS  2011-10-17   09h 52m   29  16  3   1   7   0   2   -

SAL3 - SALSA3 camera in Tucson (Carl Hergenrother)
ALLS - Near all-sky camera in Tucson (Carl Hergenrother)
VIST - Visual observations from Tucson (Carl Hergenrother)
VISH - Visual observations from Hermosillo (Salvador Aguirre)
HERM - PARENI camera in Hermosillo (Salvador Aguirre)
SDG - Camera in San Diego operated by Bob Lunsford
Time - 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)
NTA - Northern Taurids 
STA - Southern Taurids 
ORI - Orionids 
TUM - Tau Ursa Majorids 
EGE - Epsilon Geminids
LMI - Leo Minorids