Cart

Photo and Copyright (1999) by John Pendleton. Taken at our edge sites in Turkey, where the diamond ring effect lasted 20-25 seconds. Visual observers witnessed a rare double diamond, never seen on the centerline. Photography reveals it was actually a triple diamond!

Photos by Willy Hummel on 1998 Eclipse Edge Expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Top: Crossing the equator in Ecuador. Bottom: Scene at stern of the 100-passenger Ambasador cruise ship on eclipse day.

Our past Leonid meteor storm expeditions were to Northern Cyprus in November 1999, Guam in November 2001, and North Carolina in 2002, all based on predictions using the Lyytinen/Van Flandern EPH-based "satellite model" for comets. This model made the most accurate prediction for time, location, and peak rate of meteor storms in 1999-2002 and of meteor outbursts through 2004. See Perseid outburst results at http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/perseid/perseid_intro.asp.

H. John Wood acquired an excellent 2-hour video of the 19 November 2002 Leonids storm. The image tube was pointed toward the radiant, making most of the trails very short. Matthew Willson has extracted a 6-minute portion near the storm peak so that our web site visitors can get a sense of what this rare spectacle was like. The video is sped up by approximately a factor of three from real time. However, the field of view covers only about 10% of the sky. So the video extract shows only about 1/3 of the meteors that an on-site observer might have seen under ideal viewing conditions. Caution: The file type is "wmv" (for Windows Media Video), and the extract file size is 66 MB. So as a practical matter, broadband internet access is required to download and view this file. And be sure you have the free Windows Media Player or some other software that can play videos of that file type, or can transport the file to a Windows computer. Then click on download video.