Leonids (and others) on night of 16th-17th November 2021

[Rick]

Meteors recorded by my GMN camera on the night of 16th-17th November 2021. It was a partly coudy night with an almost full moon, but the system still spotted 8 Leonids, 3 Northern Taurids, 2 alpha Monocerotids, 2 November theta Aurigids, 2 Omicron Eridanids, 1 November Orionid and 19 sporadics. A few of the meteor trails are so short that it's not possible for the system to determine whether they belong to a shower or not.


Gallery link

The longest trail was produced by a Leonid a few minutes before the Leonid radiant rose. Analysis by the UK Meteor Network shows that the trail was 160 kms long, and never got below 120 kms altitude, so the meteoroid may have skipped back off into space.

This diagram shows where the system thinks the meteors came from. The various radiants identified are shown as the rings, and the lines representing the meteors are correspondingly coloured where possible.

[ApophisAstros]

Caught an early Leonid last night at 17:30
North is about 9-10 O`clock.
Roger

[Rick]

The UKMON Leonids 2021 summary is out now. See https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2021/LEO/index.html

Almost half of the Leonid detections made by cameras around the UK were matched and used to determine orbits for the meteoroids.

[Rick]

...though I think the report's a little premature, as I caught a dozen more probable Leonids last night.

The automatic identification does reasonably well, but sometimes, when multiple matching observations are reduced, a meteor turns out to belong to a different shower (or none). The brightest one in the image at the top of this thread was identified as a Leonid by my system. the automatic data reduction (using images from nine cameras) couldn't get a good handle on it, possibly because two simultaneous events were mixed up, or that the automatic centroid identification struggled because of the brightness. Mark McIntyre did a manual reduction using a subset of the images, and it turned out to be a late Orionid, not a Leonid.

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2021/orbits/202111/20211117/20211117_054502.196_UK/index.html

It was caught nicely by a couple of all-sky cameras as well as a few GMN cameras like mine.

[Rick]

Here's last night's collection:


Gallery link