[Chaos-l] Spectacular Orionid

[Tony Garcia]

This was amazing Jon !!  I've re-read this several times imagining the
detail.

I got up early to catch the shower peak before dawn, around 5 am, but only
saw a few faint ones.  At the Jordan Lake session Saturday night a few
people were laying down on the grass near me and saw 2-3 meteors.

I tried a few long exposures with my camera from 5am to dawn but didn't
grab anything, does anyone have any advice on this front?  I simply did a
series of 30 second exposures pointing at Orion and I was thinking I
probably need to use more specific settings and technique.

-ctg


On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:37 AM, Jon Stewart-Taylor <joncst at earthlink.net>wrote:

> Hi all.  At just after 3:30 am EDT tonight (10/21) i saw a spectacular
> Orionid meteor. It appeared in the constellation Orion, so it was close to
> the radient.  This means it was fairly short,, maybe 5 or 8 degrees long.
>  It was very bright, though, brighter than Jupiter, and both left a trail
> and threw off sparks.  After the meteor itself was gone, there was a bright
> afterglow left on the sky, perhaps as much as 3 degrees long, glowing at
> maybe mag 2.5.  Over the next 10 minutes, the glow elongated and distorted
> until it was vaguely "C"-shaped, and covered an area about 5 degrees in
> diameter.  During this period it drifted from its original position just
> east of Orion's shield to the WNW.  It finally faded to invisibility about
> 1 degree from the Hyades.
>
> Best meteor i've seen since the '99 Leonids!
>
> J.
>
> PS: in 2.5 hours from 2:15 to 4:45, i logged 25 Orionids and 8 sporadics.
> --
> Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
> Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos
> Cape Fear Astronomy: http://www.capefearastro.org/
>
>
>
>
>
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