Friday night’s Orionids shower

First and foremost my apologies to my fellow KAC members for not attending Friday nights gathering in Banna, did not see message until 11.30pm when I returned home. With the night clear I took the opportunity to spend a few hours stargazing and more particularly the Orionids meteor shower.

And what I night I had from about 12.30 to 1.30am I counted 11 Orionids meteors passing over my house, travelling in an east-west direction slightly greenish in colour and moving very fast. I also took the opportunity to located Messiers 31,33,45,81 and 82.

John,
You missed a great night's observing. We saw 6 orionids in one period of about 30 minutes from midnight. Five of them were very bright (mag 2 to -1) and all left spectacular trails :shock:
Heading out again to Banna now.

Just to clarify my sighting of the eleven I saw six were really bright with the remainder faint. My brother in Ballyduff counted four.

Last night was very disappointing cloud rolled in about 9pm and the night was lost.
Did see bright meteor to the north kind of yellow in colour at about 8.30pm.

We were at banna last night, It was cloudy, but we had a lot of clear skies between clouds. We left the scopes in the cars and just used the binocs. You could be looking east one minute and the next the only clear part might have been in the west.
We saw a few orionids and all were bright and left trails.

Check out today’s (23.10.2006) astronomy picture of the day of the Orionids meteor shower over Turkey.

antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Damn, imagine if the eclipse was about this time, we would have got in a mighty meteor shower to boot !,