The 2010 twitter Meteorwatch is moving into its third night after the peak night saw such a volume of traffic, the coordinate website’s server went down. The Royal Astronomical Society and redstation.com have stepped in as new hosts and in the interim, the interactive bits such as the Map and Gallery ran on Scibuff’s website.
In the meantime, images like this, this by the Pleiades and these still came through as well as videos like this. The IMO activity profile suggests the peak hit the expected 80 meteors an hour. Media coverage of last night includes Channel 4 news and the Sun. Tangentially relevant stories released in the past day include this one on the meteor man Alexander Stewart Herschel by the Science Museum and this one on Meteor Crater by NASA Goddard’s Blueshift Blog.
My own perspective included lots of typing on twitter with one eye on the satellite picture of cloud cover over the UK. At some point, I was dragged outside by my mother, just as the cloud was clearing and we, with the help of the cat, saw twenty or so meteors, including a few bright ones and many with persistent trails. The film camera clicked and whirred away, but the results will need developing later. Then back in with the cloud before in and out repeatedly to catch another five meteors in total between smaller, later gaps.
Tonight’s efforts are already underway with images like this and this of the same fireball coming in from a star party. Another star party is the subject of a broadcast on Astronomy.fm and the fun continues on the twitter #meteorwatch too.
Where the Sun hits the sky 
