Finding a clear dark sky is one of the greatest pleasures I know. They were common where I grew up. A ten minute drive from town on a cloudless night would reward you with a beautifully starry sky. In under an hour you'd be a thousand meters higher in the mountains with a beautiful view of the Milky Way. Unfortunately most of my life has been in areas a lot of light pollution, but I still go out for events like meteor showers.
Comets leave dusty trails as they orbit the Sun. When the Earth passes through some of these trails tiny specs of once-comet strike the atmosphere at very high speeds and leave a streak across the sky as they burn up. Many of you have probably seen Perseids as they streak overhead at nearly 60 km/h. It peaks around August 12 and reliably gives about one to two hundred meteors an hour in very dark areas. Many of them are large and bright enough that suburban viewers often see twenty an hour.
The Leonid shower peaks on November 17. It's usually not as dramatic as the Perseids and many of us live in regions that are cold and cloudy. But something special can happen about every 33 to 35 years. The trail has interacted with Jupiter's orbit and has become quite clumpy. The clumps are narrow enough that the the Earth moves through them in an hour or two. If you're lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and it's clear you may see the show of your lifetime.
As a kid I read about a storm of Leonids that was visible over a narrow band of California and Oregon. Apparently it was mostly cloudy over the West Coast, but a few people in the Sierras had exceptionally clear skies and there were reports between 5,000 and 10,000 an hour for about an hour.
It was well below freezing and cloudy in New Jersey on the November 17 in 2001. You don't know where these clumps are and if you'll be the path. I knew there was a slight chance of a storm and had been up all night, but it was mostly cloudy until about 3am. Around 4 the storm began. I knew this was it. I ran back and took my chances waking Sukie. She isn't exactly a morning person. One the other hand this could be a once in a lifetime event - even if you lived a thousand years.
The sky was partly overcast and ground was covered by a few inches of snow. To get away from the street lights we walked to a clearing in the woods, but light pollution limited seeing to forth magnitude stars. The storm intensified and I started recording the meteors in tens rather than one at a time. At times four or five streaks would be crossing the sky at any moment. All of this and about a half dozen bright fireballs with the brightest casting a shadow as it broke into several pieces.
I probably saw around 2,000 meteors during those ninety minutes. Not that I had much of a sense of time as it seemed to only last a few minutes. A corrected rate for a dark area would be in the 8,000 to 12,000 range. Some folks in the Adirondacks had a clear dark sky and reported peak rates exceeding 7,000 per hour. I didn't go to work that day.
The next year saw another Leonid storm about a quarter as intense, but it was mostly over Europe. Around 2034 or 35 you might get lucky. Astronomers are learning how to track clumps and better predict times and areas.
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