This year's Leonid storm is no so OT for Asia Forum. In fact, not mentioned in your article, is that the Stitch-Tate Longitude is considered by most cognizant astronomers to be optimal for viewing.
Also, this time the moon will be new hence no moon dulling the effect of the (hoped for by viewers) storm. Whereas next year's viewing will time out with night in Europe but will be accompanied by a setting gibbous moon.
In fact, earlier this year, I was doing a bit of research on this and had begun planning a trip to said Longitude for just this chance in a lifetime to see the storm in peak conditions.
Anticipating my wife's skepticism over such a junket, I was indeed planning out a trip to the Gobi, figuring that Ulaam-Baatar or thereabouts would be a suitably cloudless environment and far enough from the glittering distractions of more southerly Bangkok's Patpong to satisfy the most stringent of requirements.
For further reading on this fascinating (to me) subject, here is a great website I found:
skypub.com
The accompanying graphics are quite helpful and so are the other neighboring websites. Note: this is a 60 minute event window so don't be caught sleeping best viewing time is midnight till dawn. Not sure the exact time offset to Asia, but the best guess time I've seen is 1943 hours Universal Time for peak viewing. Stitch, Bernie what's your time offset to Greenwich, England ? |
