Warm weather and clear skies meant that favorable and comfortable observing conditions were expected for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, however this also coincided with the full moon who was determined not to be out shone by the annual meteor display.
The Perseids, for me, always signal that the start of the astronomy season will soon be here. The peak of the Perseids often coincided with the solarsphere festival where astronomical interests were piqued for many and we started to gaze upwards and revisit what we had forgotten over the summer months. Last night was no different, it felt like a while since I had really looked up and paid any attention to the constellations and sat in quite anticipation for the best fireball you have ever seen.
In the nights prior to the peak, I had seen some really nice Perseids, long with lingering ionisation trails which gave hope that we would be in for a good show. That coupled with the UKMON data, which has been showing that video detections for Perseids had been suggesting that the rates this year were high. On the evening we had everything poised and ready, Raspberry Pi was freshly rebooted and ready to detect, the Radio detector was double checked for correct frequencies and was up and running, the DSLRs were set up, full batteries and formatted memory cards and of course the deck chairs were set up in fully reclined mode.
Our observations were washed out by the moon but we did catch a glipse of several nice shooting stars that warranted the obligatory oooooohhhhhhh and haaaaaaaa did you see that one?! The radio detector, tuned into GRAVES transmitter in France picked up a peak of 34 meteors at 3am. The Rapberry Pi cam had 51 observations with the radiants calculated to be Perseids and visually we had observed around 8 per hour. And at the moment Zilch on the back of the DSLR camera (booooo and hissss). Overall a pretty successful and nice evening under the stars. Below is a timelaspe of the evening and the Radio detection heat map
