Given the large volume of traffic regarding the Leonid meteor shower (storm?) already transcribed through the [SE] mailing list, I thought I would give a brief summary of our observations/experience from outside of Agadir, Morocco. I apologize if this "off topic" posting violates the nature of this e-mail exploder and I am reporting on this as a result of the apparent interest from this group at large.
Myself and twelve others (including the two pilots of our chartered aircraft, and three local cab drivers) observed the Leonid meteor shower from a remote site approximately 30 km inland from the coastal city of Agadir, Morocco. This was a very dark sky site, on the South side of the Atlas Mountains, in a field off of the road from Agadir to Marrakech. Specifically we were located at 30D 28.90'N, 9D 21.422'W (altitude 480 feet). With eight of us observing (including 4 experienced observers; myself, Craig Small, Joel Moskowitz, and John Beattie plus the Wright family from London) to allow "full sky" coverage (though admittedly, in the excitement not always in an unbiased or well coordinated manner), we estimated a PEAK hourly rate of 4000 to 5000 for a period approximately 15 minutes centered on ~ 2:08 UT. Note that this was NOT sustained for a full hour, as we estimate the rate for a period 20 minutes before and after that time to be ~ 1000 - 2000 per hour.
The maximum of the shower was very sharply peaked and the rise to and fall from the 1 to 1.5 meteor per second sustained rate over the central 15 minutes was very noticeable. Many events were "multiple", where two to as many as six or seven meteors were seen in bursts of two seconds or less having similar apparent trajectories. Observation of this shower/storm gave me a true sense of the meaning of the "radiant", as with a continuous stream of events it was visually obvious as to exactly where the radiant was. The paralactic perspective pointing back to Leo had almost a 3D quality to it, though I know this is just a subjective description and cannot actually be so.
We had a few, but not a large number of very bright bolides. This incudes one which as it "exploded" literally was seen by some looking in the other direction as the ground lit up; and one which had a very uncharacteristic, but brilliantly unmistakable green color as it vaporized. Many trails of the brightest meteors were seen for several minutes (AFTER moonset, so were not simply reflected moonlight). We had intended to join Joe Rao's group in Lanzorate (Canary Islands), Spain, but it was obvious on the 17th that the weather would not cooperate, and hence charted a Beech 1900D from Atlantic Airways to fly us to Morocco. The weather situation can be seen in a nutshell in the Meteosat IR image at: http://satpix.nottingham.ac.uk/satpix/archive/D2/18NOV99/D2_04.JPG This is an IR2 image, and the clouds over the Canary Islands are obvious. Our location was just to the "right" of the fiducial "+" on the Moroccan coast. The very white light band running through central Morocco is not cloud, but how the Atlas Mountains show up on the IR2 Meteosat image. It was a cloudness sky and very dark (after moonset, which occurred before the peak of the shower), with stars to V <~ 6 easily visible to the naked eye.
I have my films (on Ektachrome P1600) out being processed and transferred to CD ROM at the moment. I hope to have a more complete report with photos up in a week or two. I want to take a moment to thank Charlie Cooper and Eyad Attalah at the State University of New York at Albany's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for their remote real-time support in finding us an ideal alternate observing site. Sorry for taking up the bandwidth on the [SE] exploder for this summary, but it was SPECTACULAR!
Glenn Schneider http://nicmosis.as.arizona.edu:8000/gschneider.
html http://rtd.com/~gschneid/UMBRAPHILE.html
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