Chasing the Leonid Meteor Shower 1999

All the experts were predicting a spectacular showing by the Leonid meteor shower in 1998, 1999 or perhaps next year. If not then it will be another 33 years before the earth passes through the right part of space. It didn’t quite happen in 1998, so this year looked to me like a good bet to see 100,000 meteors in an hour. (Or maybe 25,000 in 15 minutes). Of course your little part of the planet has to be pointing in the right direction for this to happen and you have to have clear skies. As the weather in Gauteng had been mostly cloudy in the days leading up to November 17th, I decided to pack my bags and go west. According to the TV weather map the clear skies were west of that traditional line that runs Northwest from about Knysna to the Kalahari so I decided to head west towards Upington and keep monitoring the sky conditions as I went along.

As luck would have it the TV weatherman was just about spot on, for as we passed Kuruman the sky got steadily clearer and at Upington it was absolutely brilliant. So we stopped at a little B&B farm about 50 km north of Upington on the Kalahari Gemsbok park road and hit the sack intending to get up at about 2 am. My internal alarm clock doesn’t work well in these conditions and it wakes me up 2 hours early, just to make sure I don’t miss the event. So I sat out on a deck chair from about midnight enjoying the most fantastic skies you can imagine. The brightish moon spoiled things a little, but I was able to see down to mag 6.0 with the unaided eye.

There were a few sporadic meteors here and there and then suddenly one or two that were obviously Leonids. I called Val and together we settled down just before 3 am to do some serious observing, recording our observations as they happened.

It started slowly, with 2 or 3 a minute and built up to about 15 a minute at the peak. Most of them were brighter than mag 2 and left a smoke trail. There were only a couple that were brighter than Jupiter and they looked spectacular, but none that rivalled the moon in brightness.

It felt like we were attending a cosmic fireworks display. At times there were 2 or 3 in the sky at the same time. They were shooting in all directions all over the sky.

At about 4 am twilight just became visible, and my tape ran out and I had to go inside and fetch another one. The tape was soon replaced but the light in the east was intruding on the display and I called it a day (or night) at about 4.20 am. I believe the peak seems to have been at about 4.15 am.

It was quite spectacular. We saw 410 meteors in just less than 100 minutes. Can you imagine what that display of 100,000 meteors in an hour must look like? They say it might happen next year.

Guess where I am going to be.

Brian Fraser