(SNES) CLUB ONLY: Leonid Meteor Storm over China: An American's Impressions...

[Lew Gramer <dedalus@alum.mit.edu>]

[Local Newsletter Editors and friends: This is a *VERY ROUGH* first
essay of my "impressions" from my Leonid trip to China. Please edit
as you see fit, for inclusion in Club newsletters ONLY! Otherwise I
would prefer if you not distribute this, either via email or as HTML
to any Web sites, until I have received feedback from some of those
who are mentioned in this essay on its suitability. However, purely
for LOCAL publication, I would really enjoy it if you felt any part
of it was worth sharing with fellow Club members...]


Lew Gramer, Outreach Director and active observer with the North
American Meteor Network (http://www.namnmeteors.org) was honored
to be the sole US representative for the "2001 Sino-Dutch Leonid
Expedition" to China this November.

I was in China, together with members of the Dutch Meteor Society,
at the kind invitation of senior astronomer Zhu Jin, of the "NAOC"
(National Astronomical Observatories of China). Dr. Zhu's primary
research interest is in asteroids, but in the last several years,
Jin has expanded his research, to encompass the study of meteors
and meteoroid streams. He is a member of the IAU "Commission 22"
(Meteors, Meteorites and Interplanetary Dust), and is active in
Commission 22's Pro-Am Working group, which aims to further the
cooperation between amateurs and professionals in the field.

==

My time in China was just 10 days - hardly enough to appreciate my
very first experience outside of the West... These are some of my
impressions, just one week after returning from that experience.


I spent a few days before and after the Leonids in Beijing: before-
hand I stayed in a graduate student dorm on the main NAOC campus in
the northern part of the city. And following the Leonids I was in a
small hotel, mainly frequented by Chinese business people, just a 20
minute walk from Tiananmen Square, Mao's Tomb, and Forbidden City.


During the main period of Leonid "background" activity, i.e., the
nights of 15 Nov through 20 Nov, our host Zhu Jin arranged for the
Sino-Dutch team (among them some of Jin's own grad students, col-
leagues, and interns) to observe and live at Xinglong Station, one
of NAOC's main observing facilities, lying at 860m atop a ridge in
Hebei Province, 120km northeast of Beijing. Xinglong is the site of
China's 2.16m, and several other large telescopes - among them the
main research instrument of Jin's team, a 90/60cm Schmidt scope.

For the maximum nights, teams of Dutch and Chinese observers fanned
out to three other sites 50-70km distant from Xinglong, giving the
baselines necessary to do multistation photography and video of the
Leonid activity. Of course one DMS team remained at Xinglong also.

Among their research goals, in addition to the simple rate determin-
ations we were all there to make, were to calculate precise traject-
ories for Leonids from various "storm components", surrounding peak
night. This can allow not only particle orbit determinations, which
might prove invaluable in improving the "dust models" on which most
Leonid predictions have been based in recent years. It can also give
quantitative data on meteor "burn heights", which may provide clues
to meteoroid/comet composition, and may ultimately help research on
organic "volatiles" in comets, and the origins of life of Earth...

Clearly, DMS and Dr. Zhu were interested in more than simple ZHRs.

==

Xinglong lies at the end of a long, perilous 3 hour bus drive via
Chinese highway and mountain road, up into the Yan Shan mountains.
There is a town of Xinglong a few km away, as well as two or three
tiny mountain villages full of warm people and grinding poverty.

The Station was a whole new world for this Westerner - made yet
stranger by the fact that our entire team lived among and in the
same style as all the other astronomers and students... We slept
in communal dorms with one shared "facility" per dorm; and a big
thermos for each room, which we could fill up with boiling water
from the kitchen once a day, if we wanted to have drinking water.

This experience of living as a Chinese astronomer would live, was
perhaps the thing that most impressed me during my visit. I saw no
distinction between revered astronomers and new graduate students:
If anyone desired to fill their thermos, they would awake promptly
at the right hour, no matter how hard a night of work they may have
done at the telescopes, and trudge through the cold to the communal
dining area with thermos in hand. On washing day, everyone brought
their sheets and blankets down to be washed by hand as well. These
Chinese professional astronomers were not merely highly dedicated,
but also physically tough as well. I was humbled by this.


For all five nights of observing (and to be frank, I inadvertently
slept through the final post-storm night of 19/20 Nov!), Xinglong's
observers were stationed at the top of a shaky ladder climb, on the
roof of a building attached to the 90/60cm dome. The big telescope's
dome blocked out the lower elevations in the East for our observers.
But this was not a serious problem, for as any meteor observer will
tell you, shower meteors really do appear all over the sky!

During the height of the storm, we were joined by a youngster: the
8 year old daughter of our host, Dr. Zhu... Our young guest enjoyed
all the excitement of the adults and students for a while. But once
the sandman made his visit, she became mightily unimpressed by the
40-per-minute bursts and fireballs, and curled up beside daddy. :)

Otherwise, throughout the incredible experience of the "Great 2001
Australasian Meteor Storm", all observers present in Xinglong were
anxiously recording every nuance of the changing activity. This was
my first experience recording a true meteor storm. (I have recorded
less intense "outbursts" from the Leonids and Perseids in previous
years, as well as the "Fireball Shower" from the Leonids in 1998.)

Among the more intriguing incites I gleaned from the experience:


1) It is impossible to be TOO prepared... I had been (so I thought)
quite "paranoid" in my preparations for observing this event, and I
still found myself wishing I had better equipment with me.

(Among my "wish I hads" was a LOUDER period timer: my little wrist
watch will ding every minute without any problems. And I'll usually
hear it through the Winter layers without problem: but when I am in
a group of 10+ other observers, and fireballs are happening every 2
or 3 minutes, it simply isn't loud enough!)


2) Facing the radiant of a shower - at least during highly enhanced
activity periods - really DOES appear to enhance one's perception!

(I had never been sure of this myself. But during the last hour of
the sustained fusillade which was the Australasian Leonid storm, I
had to conclude albeit subjectively, that this was indeed the case!)


3) It IS possible - and some had doubted this - to actually estimate
the magnitude of every meteor one sees, at least up to short bursts
of 40 per minute, and sustained rates above 20/minute. But then, my
longest contiguous period above 20 meteors/min was only 10 minutes!

(Now as for my accuracy in these estimates - maybe it was as bad as
50 percent or so at the busiest times! But based on comparison with
other observers, and my own post-reactions during lulls, I would be
willing to give good odds that I did not substantially over- *or*
underestimate my magnitudes, on average, during any period...)

==

Seeing a meteor storm for the first time in my life, unquestionably,
was a personal zenith for me. However, I was surprised to find that
a still greater thrill actually came AFTER the Sun came up, and the
meteors stopped "falling": As I was staring through bleary, bloated,
red eyes at a computer screen, transcribing the THOUSANDS of verbal
magnitude estimates from my sound recorders, and then later working
and analyzing these estimates with spreadsheets and ad hoc computer
programs to produce my IMO "quick reports", something dawned on me:

Lying there in my sleeping bag, I had witnessed one of Nature's most
awesome spectacles. And not merely seen the event, but actually made
a record of it (one of many such records that night), which humanity
truly might use to increase our understanding of the Universe. This
was my first time experiencing this feeling: I suspect this sense is
rare even for professional scientists - so how precious it seemed to
me, a "mere" amateur, all those thousands of miles from home...


Again, I must thank our gracious host, Jin, for giving me the chance
to participate in this great scientific adventure! I am in his debt,
and I am now more than ever, a committed meteor astronomer for life.

Lew Gramer
=====
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