A second reasonable Lyrids night, 23-24 April 2023

[Rick]

33 meteors were caught by my Global Meteor Network camera during clear(-ish) parts of the night of 2023 April 23rd to 24th. 14 of them were Lyrids.


Gallery link

[Ivor]

Very good, jealous you're actually getting a clear patch of sky

[Rick]

Clear enough to see twenty stars (or so) and then look for meteors, anyway.

Nice thing about the Global Meteor Network system is that, most of the time, it looks after itself and just keeps watching. I can just check the results over breakfast.

[Rick]

Only 9 meteors last night. Much of the night was cloudy, with the clear spell in the early hours before dawn. Of those nine, six were well matched with ones detected by other cameras, and now have orbits. There was one Lyrid, one rho Cygnid, and four sporadics, three of cometary origin with highly eccentric orbits (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3), and one from the asteroid belt (orbit 4).

Similar analyses get done (by UKMon for cameras detecting meteors over the British Isles, and by other organisations for meteors elsewhere) for as many detections as can be matched.

[Rick]

Mark McIntyre reports:

UKMON made 2039 single-station detections, 88% of which were involved in multistation matches, leading to 331 confirmed matched Lyrids. 144 cameras were involved in matches. The brightest was mag -2.6; there were no fireballs or potential meteorite droppers.

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2023/LYR/index.html

The peak of observations was on the night of 23/24 April, but this reflects poor weather rather than any unexpected late peak.

Looking a little closer at that report, I notice that the brightest Lyrid came in over north-west Kent and would have been almost overhead in Orpington:

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2023/orbits/202304/20230424/20230424_015103.430_UK/index.html

The brightest one my camera caught was this one:

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2023/orbits/202304/20230421/20230421_225229.474_UK/index.html