Orionids, 2012

Hey,
Frank and I went out on an impromptu observing session last night , looking for these Orionid meteors. Frank discovered a place Newmarket on Fergus that's sheltered and gives a good view of the sky, we counted 32 meteors starting at around 2.30am and finishing at 6am, by then the sky was getting bright to the east with Venus blazing in Leo.

From what we saw, we'd characterize these meteors as very fast, not bright and of a short duration with a few ionised trains lasting a second or so, blink and you'd miss it !
The meteor numbers started to taper off after 4am with only a few seen after 5, that could have been a combination of tiredness by us more then anything else as we'd hoped that we'd see more as sunrise approached.
Looking forward to the Geminids in December
Anyone else go out and try to see any ?

Sounds like a good night Dave, yeah, hoping the Geminids will provide a good show, I haven't seen a good meteor shower in some time.


Paul

Yea, it certainly was, my last meteor shower was the geminids in 2010,
it also looks like that reports for this years orionids indicate a lower then expected ZHR, somewhere between 10 and 20, which would tally up with what we saw.