Camelopardalids meteor shower: a report – 24 May 2014
The Camelopardalids live event: poster
As everybody around the globe, at Virtual Telescope we waited for the Camelopardalids meteor shower, associated to the comet 209P/Linear, visible below in a recent image taken with our PlaneWave 17″ robotic unit.
Comet 209P/Linear: 26 May 2014
Asked by many people, we scheduled a live event, to share the potential event with the world: for this, we teamed up with several observers in USA, Canada, Panama and Costa Rica. The team was composed as follows:
- astrophotographer: Joaquin Fabrega Polleri (Asociacion Panameña de Aficionados a la Astronomia, Panama);
- astrophotographer: Gary Varney (South Florida Amateur Astronomers Association, Florida);
- astrophotographer: Fernando Rodriguez (South Florida Amateur Astronomers Association, Florida);
- astrophotographer: Ron Delvaux (Delvaux Observatory, Arizona);
- astrophotographer: John W. Johnson (Omaha Astronomical Society, Nebraska)
- astrophotographer: Malcolm Park (Toronto, Canada)
- astrophotographer: Bill Longo (Sudbury, Canada)
- astrophotographer: James McCue (New Mexico, Usa)
- astrophotographer: Marcy Malavasi (Altair, Costa Rica)
- astrophotographer: Matt Todor (florida, USA)
- coordinator and live comment: astrophysicist Gianluca Masi (The Virtual Telescope Project, Italy)
All the observers did an amazing job and I’m very grateful to them for making this event possible.
The day of the event the weather was particularly good in Canada, while it was from variable to cloudy in the other Countries. All the observers, no matter the local weather, were ready to cover the meteors and share their images with us, for the live feed.
While the hoped big show did not happen (it was a prevision, after all, with no absolute warranty), there was some fine activity, with a few bright meteors promptly recorded by our observers and made available to our viewers. Well, we had quite a lot of viewers connected to our live web TV: almost 73.000 individuals from 159 Countries looked at Camelopardalids via the Virtual Telescope, making this one a great live show!
Below is the recording of the whole live coverage, lasted more than 2.5 hours and blessed with some very spectacular shots by our observers.
Below are some images of the meteors, with authors marked on the same picture
Camelopardalids – image by Bill Longo, Sudbury, Canada
Camelopardalids – image by Bill Longo, Sudbury, Canada
Camelopardalids – image by Bill Longo, Sudbury, Canada
Camelopardalids – image by Bill Longo, Sudbury, Canada
Camelopardalids – image byMalcom Park, Toronto, Canada
Camelopardalids – image byMalcom Park, Toronto, Canada
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