Camelopardalid Meteor....Storm? Shower?

 

 

*Photo taken from this website: http://www.meteorwatch.org/meteor-info/meteor-showers-2014/

Yeeeeaaaah, not quite.  Maybe a drizzle.  I was SUPER excited for this amazing possibility of seeing over 200 meteors per hour (one website even had experts predicting up to 1000).  The discovery that Earth would come into contact with the dust trail of Comet 209P/Linear was made a couple of years ago.  Since the comet's discovery, it was proven to be a poor dust producer.  But scientists had no way of knowing how active it was back in the 1800s, which is when the dust would have been produced for this meteor shower.  So, if it was producing lots of dust back then, the meteor shower would have been really spectacular.   Here's a great site that really explains just about everything you ever wanted to know about this:

http://www.space.com/25982-rare-meteor-shower-camelopardalid-comet-unknowns.html

So I tried REALLY hard to get a group of people to drive out somewhere with me and find some dark skies to watch them, hoping for the "spectacular dust" scenario.  Apparently, NO ONE wanted to be AWESOME with me, and they had better things to do, like sleeping.  I even asked if I could crash the lawns of friends who lived away from the city, even if they didn't want to stay up and watch.  No dice. So, since I didn't have a dark place to go that I knew would be available, I caffeined-up, threw on a jacket, and took a camping chair outside to my backyard in Nashville.  At least the action would be in the north, where I had the clearest view and the darkest sky (our light pollution here is ridiculous). 

And so I sat and watched.  Almost all night.  Around 11:30, I started to see a couple of bright streaks here and there, and I started thinking that maybe there was something to this.  About an hour later, I was seeing what could either have been a LOT of really faint streaks or just my eyes playing tricks on me.  At this point, I started getting a little grumpy about the fact that I was trying to watch these with Nashville's light pollution.  I also got a little too excited over what turned out to be fireflies closer to the horizon.  At about 2:00, the clouds rolled in from the west and blocked the view, so I went back inside and kept checking the sky every now and then to see if it had cleared up.

By 3 a.m., even with the caffeine, I was so tired that I had to throw in the towel.  I didn't make it to sunrise to see Venus and the crescent moon rising, like I had hoped.

So that's my historic meteor shower story.  I checked this morning to see if other people around the U.S. had any luck, and their stories are pretty much the same, even with darker and clearer skies.  But I figure that, hey, I'm young.  There's always the next one!  Here's a picture taken by some lucky person who actually caught one on camera:

I got it here:  http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1136640