Is it just me, or does it seem that all of the coolest things like this happen at the most insane hours of the night. It can’t be at 9:30 or 10:00. It always has to be like an hour or two before Sunrise or something crazy.
I don’t know. I don’t think I want to see fireballs or the likes in the daytime sky. I’m not limber enough anymore to be able to kiss my ass goodbye.
Most nights one can lie out under the stars and observe incoming space debris; these showers are just a bit more frequent, at least one streak a minute. True storms of meteors have been observed from time to time, a few times a century, and the rates are perhaps four or five a minute. Even those are related to annual showers, and have from time to time seem to have been the swan song of some well-known ones.
There’s also the matter of the location of the Sun on visibility. The sky has to be quite dark to observe most streakers. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a daylight meteor, it was quite a display, during the summer of 2002. It was large enough to appear to be actually tumbling, and was throwing off pieces of itself. I never heard of any parts touching down, nor do I know the distance at the time (iow, whether it was picked up on radar), but I and the others present lost sight of it behind the nearby trees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrantids
[snip] The peak intensity is exceedingly sharp: the meteor rates exceed one-half of their highest value for only about 8 hours (compared to two days for the August Perseids). This means that the stream of particles that produces this shower is narrow — and apparently deriving from and within the last 500 years from some orbiting body.[1] The parent body of the Quadrantids was recently tentatively identified (in a paper by Peter Jenniskens) as the minor planet 2003 EH1, which in turn may be the same object as the comet C/1490 Y1 [2] which was observed by Chinese, Japanese and Korean astronomers 500 years ago. [snip]
Rats!Rats!Rats!
It’s not just you, KR. Additionally, there’s a lot of cloud cover where we live that obscures heavenly events here. Love the greenery but keep missing these things.