Oolite Bulletins

For anyone who’s up before dawn this morning (17th) or tomorrow morning (18th), there’s a very good chance of a nice meteor shower in the eastern sky, if it’s clear… the Leonids sometimes provide a spectacular show.

Unfortunately, it's horribly cloudy here in pajero county.

El Viejo wrote:

For anyone who’s up before dawn this morning (17th) or tomorrow morning (18th), there’s a very good chance of a nice meteor shower in the eastern sky, if it’s clear… the Leonids sometimes provide a spectacular show.

Unfortunately, it's horribly cloudy here in pajero county.

It does not make sense using things like "before dawn this morning (17th)" on a worldwide visited forum. I just looked it up for western europe. Leon rises above the horizon in the east at 23 h30 GMT and disappears beyond the horizon at 13 h20 GMT. So the Leonids should be visible the major part of the night here.

My favorite program to watch the sky is stellarium. Its an amazing program to show the sky on your screen. First define your exacts location (with F6) on the globus and than the screen display makes it much easier to locate the stars in the real sky.

I use the mac version, but according to above link there is also a windows and linux version. Its open source, like Oolite, and despite the low version number it already looks amazing.

What's especially impressive is that stellarium runs on my smartphone

Cloudy here in London (Not that there's a high chance of seeing anything anyway with this lightpollution)

As for watching meteor showers, in general you will get the maxima in the early morning hours though, rather than in the evening, as the earth plows 'head-on' into the dust trails rather than any meteors having to 'catch up' with the earth.

I've used Stellarium on Windows and OS X, great program. Along with Celestia. Both excellent for Space enthusiasts.

Eric Walch wrote:

It does not make sense using things like "before dawn this morning (17th)" on a worldwide visited forum.

It makes sense for a meteor shower that lasts for two or three days. Pre-dawn on a certain date, is pre-dawn on a certain date, no matter what part of the globe you’re living on (except for the two poles, maybe). As Micha says, pre-dawn is usually the best time for meteor showers, especially when there is a large moon in the sky, as there is now. If it had been time-zone critical, as with yesterday’s asteroid flypast, then I would have mentioned it.

The annoying thing is that it's going to be cloudy again here tonight.

As you say, Stellarium is a nice tool.

+1 for Stellarium, a great piece of software. I was looking up something a while ago when the Perseids happened to be on, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a little stream of light near Perseus - I never realised it showed meteor showers and it was nice unexpected detail.

My Astronomical society would be lost without Stellarium - it's awesome!

Cheers,

Drew.