My wife and I spent Christmas Day in Fort Wayne visiting her family. Christmas itself was a mostly cloudy but fairly mild day, with some very light rain in the morning and an afternoon high (in Indianapolis) of 41 F. The clouds started to break up in Fort Wayne not long after sunset, and by the time I went outside to warm up the car and start packing up the gifts, the sky was just amazingly clear. The Waxing Crescent Moon was shining in the Southwest sky, showing some bright Earthshine on its disk. To the East, the stars of Taurus and Orion were blazing away. While I was out there, I saw a fairly bright meteor shoot through the constellation of Cetus, seeming to originate near the Hyades in Taurus. It seemed like a great way to end Christmas 2014!
Skies remained mostly clear throughout our drive back to the Indianapolis south side. After we'd dropped some passengers off in Greenwood and we were almost home, Adrian spotted a bright meteor zipping to the north which she described as bright as Jupiter. I didn't see it at all. Then, when we finally reached home, I went outside to the back yard to "supervise" our two little dogs after they'd been inside for over 12 hours. (I try to get out there with them after dark because of concerns like stray dogs and even coyotes wandering around the neighborhood at night.) While I was out there, I spotted yet another meteor that might have come from the Taurus area. Skies were crystal clear, the Moon had set, and I was starting to wonder if maybe some unusual meteor shower activity was going on! I decided to try and do a meteor watch, even though it was getting pretty cold out there!
I did two sessions of meteor watching total during the predawn hours of December 26. I was lying in the lawn chair on the patio, about as bundled up as a person can get. I had on two sweatshirts over a t-shirt, my thick winter coat over that, two pairs of sweat pants, two pairs of socks under my shoes, my hat and gloves and the hood of one of the sweatshirts over my head, and I also had a pair of hand warmers in both pockets of the coat. I carried some BRNO Atlas charts outside with me, and I also had my digital voice recorder on hand so I could just record the information about any meteors spotted by voice. Each session lasted a little over an hour, and by the time I was done my hands and feet were numb and painful from lying out in that cold air. The temperature was about 30 F but there was a breeze that probably put wind chills in the low 20's F range.
The first session lasted from 1:00 AM - 2:05 AM, and it was a frustrating one. In all that time outside I was only able to spot one faint Sporadic meteor. I'd seen two earlier that night without even trying, and after purposely staring at the sky, I saw nothing at all! I was facing south, looking high in the sky near Gamma Geminorum. The limiting magnitude was 5.3; about as good as it gets from my back yard!
This is the plot of the Sporadic seen during that first session outside:
I had a lot better luck during the second session. This one was from 3:00 AM - 4:05 AM, and I had turned the lawn chair to look high in the northeast this time, in the direction of the "bowl" of the Big Dipper, since a lot of current minor shower radiants were located in this area of the sky. During this time I was able to spot and plot a total of four meteors. Two of them were Sporadic and one very slow one (#2) was almost without a doubt a late member of the Ursid Shower, even though this shower had peaked four nights earlier. The brightest one of the night was also the most puzzling (#4). This one seemed to have a speed and a direction that identified it as a member of the Quadrantid Shower. However, all of the sources I'd read told me that Quadrantid meteors weren't visible until December 28 at the earliest. Had I really seen one two nights before the "official" start of this shower?
These are the plots of the last four meteors seen tonight on the BRNO Atlas pages:
By the end of the second session, high thin cirrus clouds started to drift over the sky from the north and west, so I gave up doing any other meteor watching. (I was shivering by now anyway in that frosty air!)
I posted the question about whether or not I'd actually seen an early Quadrantid meteor to the Yahoo Meteor Observing Board on the 26th, and generally the comments from experienced observers on that message board were negative. Most replies told me that it was probably a Sporadic that just by chance happened to be in the right area at the right apparent speed. Still, I'm not totally ready to just dismiss this one as a random meteor instead of a Quadrantid! Maybe time will tell.
The Ursid meteor seen tonight was the first one I'd ever seen!
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