I drove from Sacramento to Echo Lake Snow Park (about 2100 meters/7000 ft)
just over the summit on the way to Lake Tahoe and enjoyed almost three hours
of the best meteor display I've ever seen. Saturn was so bright and high in
the sky I wondered if it would affect our night vision. There were plenty of
trees blocking the horizon, thin clouds diminishing visibility of between
30% and 500f the sky and some light pollution to the north/north-east, but
my 14 year old son and I still counted over 1500 events over a
two-and-a-half hour period. We timed how long it took to get to each
increment of 100 sightings, ranging from 15 minutes at the beginning and end
of our viewing period to only 6 minutes at around 2:30, a rate of 1000/hr.
One particularly spectacular meteor left a train that was amazingly
persistent, leaving a faintly glowing smudge for over a minute. Several
times we saw four or five simultaneous events.
There were a couple of other enthusiasts nearby for the first hour or so,
and in the peaceful seclusion of the dark, empty parking lot we could hear
each other quietly exclaiming at the longer, brighter displays. Truly
memorable. My '85 MR2 has no spoiler on the trunk so laying back on the
vented engine cover behind the rear window and resting our heads on the roof
made the perfect heated deck chair for cold-weather star-gazing.
(Olympus content) I only took one picture, using my beat-up old Camedia
D-450 Zoom. It's not much of a photo but illustrates the mid-engined
two-seater star-gazing deck chair concept:
http://homepage.mac.com/jmi/
Joel Ingulsrud
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