leonids

["John S. Denker" <jsd@AV8N.COM>]

There should be meteors in the wee hours of Nov 19th,
if you get up early Wednesday morning (or stay up late
Tuesday night).  But probably mostly spoiled by weather.

US eastern-half weather forecast is lousy
  http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/USNY0996_f.html
  http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/USIL0225_f.html

By the time you're far enough west to be out of the
clouds you'll suffer because the radiant will be low
in the sky at the time of the peak activity.


Predictions as to intensity are wildly inconsistent.
See e.g. the bottom table in
  http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/10oct_doubleleonids.htm

See also
  http://science.nasa.gov/spaceweather/swpod2003/17nov03/LEO03_ZHR.gif
and note that the abscissa is UTC.

Similarly
  http://celestialdelights.info/ms/leonids2003b.html

For more detail we have
  http://www.imcce.fr/s2p/leonides/predictions/Leonid_forecast_2003.html
which says predictions about the 1533 stream are "highly uncertain".
I'm not sure I understand the data I'm seeing, but one
hypothesis is that this stream is relatively compact
(whereas others are more diffuse) so if you hit it there'll
be a big show ... but you might not hit it at all.

If you want to make a real science project out of it,
(real science, not an exercise, not make-work) see
  http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/leonid/stormcount.html

For a nice sky map, see
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Yoursky?date=1&utc=2003-11-19+7%3A30%3A00&jd=2452963.22917&lat=40%B045%276%22&ns=North&lon=73%B059%2739%22&ew=West&coords=on&moonp=on&deepm=2.5&consto=on&constn=on&constb=on&limag=5.5&starnm=2.0&starb=on&starbm=2.5&imgsize=640&scheme=0
... from which you can see (among other things) that
the moon is not very far from the radiant (bad) but
it is only a smallish crescent (not tooooo bad).