Skyward for July 2022
The Meteor Shower that wasn’t, but not so
much
By
David H. Levy
Herculid dropping in Hydra, just south of Corvus.
Photograph by David Levy.
On May 30 observers all across the western
hemisphere were outside, hoping to see a wonderful “new” meteor shower. The shower is actually not new. It is called the Tau Herculids, and it sends
us dust particles from Comet Schwassmann-Wachman III. In 1995 this normally faint comet brightened
dramatically as it split into several parts, releasing huge amounts of dust
into space.
On
May 30, at 10 pm Mountain Standard time, the Earth plowed through the debris
released in 1995. We were hoping for a
possible meteor storm of hundreds of thousands of meteors. Wendee and I sat outside at Jarnac
observatory, waited, watched, and waited some more. There was one bright meteor that seemed too
far from the direction my camera was
pointing for its lens to detect. Ten
o’clock came and went, and we counted a few shooting stars here and there. Over
the course of the evening we counted 18 meteors. But a meteor storm? To use the Yiddish word that means what you
think it means, we saw bupkis.
Somewhat disappointed, we went indoors and completed a quiet evening.
The
next day, I examined the pictures I took.
I have found that it is very difficult for a camera to record all but
the brightest meteors, even from the major showers. But the second picture I saw captured the
bright meteor I saw just south of
Corvus in Hydra, and the third frame recorded a fainter one. All in all, the camera counted five meteors,
only the first of which I actually saw.
And one frame displayed two meteors!
Even
though these meteors were generally faint, they moved so slowly that they
showed up nicely on the camera. So this
crazy little shower produced more meteors on camera than any other meteor
shower I have witnessed. The experience
proved to me that meteor showers, while poorly predictable, do offer surprises
, and this one certainly did.
There was more. In Electronic Telegram 5125 of the
International Astronomical Union, Daniel Green suggested that “a very faint
glow from scattered sunlight may be visible in the sky centered … in Leo.”
I had no difficulty at all seeing that glow in Leo, particularly when I
used averted vision, and I also noted
its absence on the following night. (I
saw a similar glow during the strong Perseid meteor shower in 1992.)
The best (by far) meteor shower I saw was the
Leonids, from near Alice Springs, Australia, in 2001. During that night Wendee and I counted 2406
meteors. This year’s Tau Herculids might
have been less than stellar, but the sky was clear, the night was beautiful,
and we enjoyed being outside as planet Earth raced through the emptiness of
space, picking up cosmic dust on its windshield along the way.
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