CMO Report on the 2001 Leonids
Great Storms of the
2001 Leonids
Last uptodated on 28 January
2002
Teruaki KUMAMORI's
image
This composite image was made of the Video images exposed for 8 minutes
by the use of a Sony TRV-900 equipped with an I.I and f35mm F1.4 lens
at the Muroh Observatory, Nara, on 18 November 2001
at 19:26 ~ 19:34 GMT.
Spica, Vir is seen near the
bottom.
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he brisk Leonid outbreaks on 18 November
2001 were very expected and occurred as expected. The predictions were made by
David ASHER (born 1966 at Edinburgh, graduated
Naoya MATSUMOTO (
by the use of a Nikon 16 mm fisheye lens at f2.8. The exposure was 7 minutes
long on Fujicolor SGA800
from 18:13 GMT on 18 November 2001.
The Leonids are associated
with the dusts left by the periodic Comet Tempel-Tuttle
(T-T). The McNAUGHT-ASHER theory depends on a
possible resonance of the planet Jupiter and Comet T-T. Any comet receives a
perturbation from the big planet Jupiter, while in the case of Comet T-T there
is a particular commensurability between the comet and the planet, since the
comet revolves five times during the period Jupiter does 14 times around the
Sun. So the dusts released from T-T can hardly be dispersed, and tend to remain
in a high density on the orbit. The orbit however receives such a steady
perturbation from Jupiter that the dust trails move out from the comet original
orbit and so there have been generated several deviated orbits of dust trails.
If the Earth hits one of this trails, not necessarily
the original comet orbit, an outbreak of meteors will occur.
ASHER calculated and predicted thus in the case of
2001 Leonids that the streams could visit on 18
November 2001 at
1) 10:01 GMT with ZHR 2500
2) 17:31 GMT with ZHR 9000
3) 18:19 GMT with ZHR 15000
Case 1) is to be caused by the dust trail made in 1767, and 2) and 3) are due to the trails generated from the
dust released from 1699 and 1866 respectively. The first one was suited to the
American continents, and the 2) and 3) were thus expected to bring the big
shows in Asia and
Note the time when the Earth crossed the orbit of T-T
(on 17 November 2001) had nothing to do with the predictions. Hence no other
than those who were dubious about ASHER's predictions
spent a stupid time outside without no showers on 17
November.
On 18 November, the outbreaks happened exactly at
those times predicted. There followed reports from
Leonids 2001 by Randy TATUM (right)
Randy TATUM at
Observation of the
2001 Leonids
by Masami MURAKAMI
The CMO and the ISSEI-Kai
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spent the night 18
November watching the Leonids with two friends of
mine (Kazuo MORI and Junnichi IIZUMI, ISSEI-KAI) at Kannami located near the
On the night of 18/19 November 2001, we began to watch
from 1:00 JST (16:00 GMT), but the sky was rather cloudy. At around 2:00 JST
however, the clouds turned to disappear and we could see several bright meteors
coming up from Leo, so that we three started to count the numbers of meteors
every 5 minutes.
We were the astronomical comrades from our high-school
days, and as in 1965 and other cases, we could array ourselves and easily set
out to start to observe the meteors just by one low shout "
Let's start":
We were thus able to watch and count the Leonid shower
for two hours and a half up until 4:30 JST when the clouds became again to
spread out. Thus we successfully spent the night on watching the dark sky with
Orion, Canis Major, Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and so on
showered across by brisk outbreaks of meteors.
We could capture many brighter meteors in addition to
usual ones, and also saw several fireballs some of which left bright remnants
durable for longer than 10 seconds. Those that started near Leo were of short
tracks and some looked like standing meteors. We also watched several meteors briskly
radiated from Leo at the same moment.
The following are our results secured during the
period every 15 minutes by three:
GMT
meteors
17:00 -
17:15 65
17:15 -
17:30 106
17:30 -
17:45 162
17:45 -
18:00 191
18:00 -
18:15 232
18:15 -
18:30 304
18:30 -
18:45 213
18:45 -
19:00 244
19:00 -
19:15 179
19:15 -
19:30 127
Total
1823
We here do not yet make any
correction to ZHR or CHR, but it is apparent these show a big peak at 18:15 - 18:30
GMT. According to our original data made every five minutes, there was a period
where the number of meteors quite decreased or was silent at 17:45 - 17:50 GMT,
and hence the doubled peaks were there, but the second one was so big that its
foot was wide enough to cover the previous one. We note we could see down to
the lower skylines, but we admit there stayed a cloud belt, though not
annoying. Rather annoying things were the head lights of the cars that came up
one after another to see the showers.
The photo here
presented shows one of fireballs (about at mag. -6)
near Leo that I made at 18:02 GMT by the use of Nikon 50mm lense
at f2.0. (Fuji NEOPAN400 PRESTO B/W-negative film)
I took a train from Kannami, the Tokaido line, to go
home at 5:06 JST. Waiting the train on the platform of the station I could saw
still some bright shooting stars among the clouds.
It was really one of the biggest events ever I
experienced.
18 Nov 2001 18h00m ~
02m GMT
(19 November 2001)
Great Outbreak of
the Leonids on 18 November 2001
by Naoya MATSUMOTO
(CMO
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realised at last on the
morning of 19 November 2001 JST !
(photo)
Naoya MATSUMOTO (
by the use of a Nikon 28 mm lens. The exposure was 7 minutes long on Fujicolor SGA800
We hitherto watched many times the sky before
dawn every year when the orbit of the periodic Comet Tempel-Tuttle
was crossed by the Earth, but we were forced repeatedly to be disappointed. But
this time a tremendous peak came just after 3 o'clock exactly in the way as was
predicted by David ASHER. The total number of meteors looked slightly less than
expected, but here in Nagasaki we could conclude that the HR amounted to about
2000 (so that ZHR = 5000). This big show is believed to be the first ever since
1867 in
1. We were very anxious about the weather as the
predicted day approached. At first the weather forecast did not give any good
hint, but as the day came the weather turned out to be better. The sky looked
however still cloudy at the northern Nagasaki including the area of Sasebo
where we live, and so we (Tatsuo KANAMARU and I) drove from Sasebo southward
about 80km to Unzen at the Shimabara
Peninsula. We chose Takaragahara at Unzen as a candidate and arrived at the observing site
(which was located at (130.26°E, 32.73°N), and height 720 metres
above the sea; according to the GSP) at 22 o'clock JST, and found the sky was
preferable, and starry. Mr KANAMARU phoned up his
home at
2. We started observing from 00:10 JST (15:10 GMT on 18
November). We had three themes to carry out:
a) Counting the meteors,
b) Photographing every ten minutes (by the use of 16 mm and 28 mm
lenses),
c) Taking pictures by the use of a high-sensitive Video camera.
The last one is a link in the Astro-HS 2001
project which covered the whole country, and so it was most important.
3. The following are some sketches of the meteor
showers we encountered:
At 15:15 GMT: The first fireball appeared. It started
from the eastern sky to northward along the horizon. Slow and long. This fireball
was caught on the Video for 3 seconds from 15:15:27, but almost outside the
camera field.
From 15:27 GMT onward, one to three meteors were seen
every minute. Since this situation differed already from yesterday's (on the
preceding night, just five meteors or so during two hours), KANAMARU said
"It looks we will have a great, unexpected night!"
From 16:15 GMT onward, meteors increased up to 2 to 6
every minute.
From 17:11 GMT onward, further
increased. More than 6 meteors per minute.
At 17:34 GMT The first peak
came! 19 meteors a minute.
At 17:45/46 GMT 20 meteors/minute.
At 18:07 GMT, total of 35 meteors appeared per minute
Henceforward until around 18:40, we continually
saw 30 meteors every minute. There was a hill at the eastern side (of altitude
angle of 10 degrees), but the whole stars of Leo were seen, and it was easily
verified that the meteors this night were directed from a point in Leo and
radiated to all angles. We should say we had never experienced such a marvelous scenery. There were seen several meteor trails.
We had prepared a camera to take the pictures of meteor trails, but we were too
busy to manipulate it under this series of brisk happenings.
At 19:49 GMT, the meteors turned to decrease in
number: Less than 10 per minute.
At 20:00 GMT (5:00 JST), we closed our observations
with much satisfaction.
We felt really tired because of two night
observations (just three hour sleep during 48 hours), but we were much pleased
to have been able to witness the outstanding/historical showers of Leonids for the first time. Bravo!
4. Figure 1 is a bar-graph which shows the increase and
decrease of the watched meteors counted every 5 minutes (made by T KANAMARU and
N M). Time shown is JST. It shows a big peak that visited around 18:10 ~ 18:40
GMT where HR was 2000, and ZHR 5000. In the eastern country where the radiation
point was higher, they say HR was upto about 3000.
Fig 1
5. The Video camera produced good
results, better than expected. The instrument has a 6mm F0.8 lens, and the
field angle is 68.5 degrees. It shot up to the fifth magnitude stars.
Due to the Project arrangement, the camera was directed and exposed to
the northern sky. It recorded a total of 1366 meteors (out of which 1222
sparkled inside the lens field) during nearly 5 hours (from 15:06 to 20:16
GMT).
Fig 2
In particular, it shows 22
meteors during one minute from 18:13 to 18:14 GMT, indicating the time of the
main peak. The camera covers just a ninth of the whole sky, and hence we can
suppose there occurred a brisk burst of 200 meteors during the minute. Figure 2
shows the meteor frequency per minute.
As well, Figure 3 is a refinement of the data
in Fig 2 (made by N M), and the bar graph shows the situation per 5 minutes
including the Z corrections. It should be noted there is shown up a short first
peak around 17 h GMT.
Fig 3
The eye-field of a usual observer is considered
four times wider than the Video eye that we utilised
this time, and therefore we can consider that four times many more meteors
appeared than the statistics in Fig 3. The naked eyes however can easily miss
many of 4th magnitude meteors that are easily checkable on the Video monitor,
and so we may conclude that the observations by the naked eye just produce two
times many more meteors than the result through Video eyes.
We hear the total results obtained by a total of 40 Video cameras of the
Astro-HS 2001 Project which were stationed variously
whole over the
Further CMO Gallery
of the Leonids
Sickle (left) :
Leo Minor-Lynx (right)
Leonids by Takaya OSHIRO at Koza-machi, Wakayama Prefecture
during the time between 17:15 and 17:51 GMT on 18 November 2001
by the use of PENTAX SPF/CANON 7S 50mm F1.4 on Fuji Superia
800.
18:13~18:18 GMT on 18
November 2001
Leonids by Morimasa
NAKAJIMA, at Manazuru, Kanagawa Prefecture
by the use of 28mm F3.5 Lens on Fuji 800 film.
18:32 ~ 18:37 GMT on
18 November 2001
Leonids by Tsutomu ISHIBASHI at Yastugatake, Nagano Prefecture
by the use of PENTAX MX 35mm F2.4 on Fuji 800 film.
18:30~18:40 GMT(left)
18:10~18:20 GMT (right)
Leonids by Hiroyuki OYAMADA, at Minamimaki-mura, Nagano Prefecture
by the use of Minolta 28mm F2.8 on Kodak Gold Max 800.
Leonids of Hisaya HASEGAWA at
This is a composite image of 6 frames each of which was exposed for 4 minutes
during the time between 18:27 and 18:54 GMT on 18 November 2001
on Fuji Superia Zoom Master 800 (ISO 800) by using an
Olympus Zuiko 50mm F1.8.
The bright star near the rightmost meteor is alpha Canis
Minoris.
Leonids by Akinori NISHITA
who took these composite pictures near Nagoya City
by the use of Nikon 50mm F1.4 about 5 Minutes on HG1600.
Leonids 2001 by Yukio
MORITA at Hiroshima Prefecture
Composite of images each exposed one or two minutes
during the period from 19:02 GMT to 19:20 GMT on 18 November 2001
on Fujicolor SO400 by the uise
of Pentax K1000 with an F2.0 lens.
Leonids 2001 by Hitomi TSUNEMACHI were exposed on Fuji color Superia 800 at Nasu, Tochigi
Prefecture
Two shots by Tomio
AKUTSU (Karasuyama, Tochigi) on the early morning
of 19 November 2001 JST
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he following is the email which Masatsugu MINAMI wrote
to Bill SHEEHAN on the very morning JST of 19 November when he returned home
from the watching of the 2001 Leonids, replying to the
email from Bill who also watched the first peak around 10:00 GMT at Willmar,
Minnesota:
From: "Masatsugu
MINAMI" <VZV03210@nifty.com>
To: <sheehanbr@tds.net>
Cc: <whitbyu@erols.com>; <cmo@mars.dti.ne.jp>;<hitomi@kh.catv.ne.jp>;
<ishadoh@m1.cosmos.ne.jp>
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 8:40 AM
Subject: RE:Re: from bill sheehan
Dear Bill,
Thank you for your prompt kind reply. Your description
is always beyond my knowledge, and so always instructive to me. I did not know
that the professional observations in
You closed your email by the following hot news:
> I was up early this morning
for Leonids. It was a brisk shower -- not
> quite up to the standard of November 1966, which I observed as just a boy
> from Minneapolis and recorded a rate of several thousand an hour (from
here,
> the Earth was just entering the thick part of the debris-tail that would
> give rise to the huge storm observed in the western part of the U.S.).
> There were, however, a few hundred an hour, making it a delightful if not
> quite awe-inspiring event. I don't expect we'll see its
like again in our
> lifetime since apparently the meteoriticists
don't anticipate another
> comparable encounter with Leonid debris until 2098.
Your email reached me at 5:48 JST this morning, and
read it just after returning home from the watching of the marvelous Leonids shower for my part.
I watched up until 5:30 JST (20:30 GMT on 18 Nov) from
1:30 JST. I suppose you watched around 10:00 GMT, because I heard a peak was
predicted so in
Leonids 2001 by Masatsugu
MINAMI at Kanazu near Mikuni,
Lots of meteors really happened
to appear. I started to go to my favourite dark site
at 1 o'clock, but already from the front glass of the car I could 
see several bright
meteors. The burst soon came as I reached the watching place. Some bright, some
long, some orange, some green, all around the sky, even at the rear side at the
west sky. I felt the peaks came really twice. The later one was more brisk, and
the peak must have had two sub-peaks.
It was fascinating to watch lower meteors down to the
skyline from the rising Leo. I wanted then to watch bright meteors falling down
to the sea, and so I moved to the coastline. I stayed until 5:30 at Tojinbo near the NOTO peninsula, but I could not catch such
a meteor because the sea-horizon must have been hazy, and the peak already
passed though several bright meteors still came across.
I could not estimate
the frequency at the peaks, but the NHK-TV is now reporting that there occurred
more than five thousands per hour. Even in the light-polluted
Leonids 2001 by Masatsugu MINAMI
at Tohjinbo, Mikuni,
I am sorry I wrote too long, but I suppose the
Japanese amateurs will talk about this event for a while. As I hear now,
TSUNEMACHI seems to have had clearer sky and watched much more meteors than me
in a dark countryside in an eastern
I shall close for now, but I thank you again for your
kind communication,
With best wishes,
Masatsugu
Click here for the
communication from Randy TATUM
Click here for the original
email from Bill SHEEHAN