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Leonids Rain in Spain


Leonids Rain in Spain
Marshall Space Flight Center
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast18nov99_1.htm

An outburst of over 1500 Leonid meteors per hour dazzled observers in Europe
and the Middle East.

November 18, 1999: According to preliminary data reported by the
International Meteor Organization and the Leonids Environment Operations
Center, there was an intense outburst of Leonid meteors over Europe and the
Middle East on Thursday morning, November 18. Maximum activity was recorded
around 0200 UT as the Earth passed through the debris stream of comet
Tempel-Tuttle.

"We observed many, many, many Leonids falling from the sky," said Casper ter
Kuile of the Dutch Meteor Society, who was working with a team of observers
located between Valencia and Alicante in Spain. "Our experienced visual
observers counted about 30 Leonids per minute!"

The high rate noted by observers in Spain, over 1800 meteors per hour, was
substantially greater than the 500 to 1000 per hour that most experts had
predicted. The storm was even more intense over parts of the Middle East,
where members of the Israeli Astronomical Association recorded 70 meteors
per minute for just over a half an hour. Like other global observers, the
Israeli team was struck by the abundance of faint meteors and the relative
absence of bright fireballs. Preliminary reports by meteor watchers in the
Canary Islands and near the Gorges du Verdon in France confirm this general
picture of the outburst.

The meteor storm was not seen west of the Atlantic. In North America sky
watchers saw relatively few Leonids -- at most 40 to 50 per hour. The
majority of these were fast-moving and dim.

Radio measurements from Japan and the Czech Republic confirm the results of
visual observers indicating a peak between 2:00 and 2:10 UT. This time
coincides with the maximum at 2:08 UT predicted by Asher and McNaught. In
their model of the Leonid meteoroid stream, the 1999 storm was caused by a
dust trail created when the Leonids parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle, passed by
the Sun about 100 years ago. The Asher-McNaught model predicts even bigger
Leonid storms in 2001 and 2002.

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