International Meteor Organization
IMO Meteor Shower Calendar 2001
compiled by Alastair McBeath and Rainer Arlt
based on information in IMO Monograph No.2:
Handbook for Visual Meteor Observers,
edited by Jürgen Rendtel, Rainer Arlt and
Alastair McBeath, IMO, 1995,
additional material extracted from data analyses produced since, and
comments provided by Rainer Arlt.
Layout by André Knöfel.
Prepared for WWW by Sirko Molau
IMO's Meteor Shower Calendar for 2001 contains the following items:
- Introduction
- Highlights January to March
- Highlights April to June
- Highlights July to September
- Highlights October to December
- epsilon-Geminids
- Orionids
- Leonids
- alpha-Monocerotids
- Phoenicids
- Monocerotids
- sigma-Hydrids
- Geminids
- Coma Berenicids
- Ursids
- Large Radiant sizes and meteor plotting
- Optimum radiant diameters for shower association
- Error limits for the angular velocity
- Angular meteor velocities
- Abbreviations
- Tables
- Lunar phases for 2001
- Working list of visual meteor showers
- Radiant positions during the year in alpha and delta
- Working list of daytime radio meteor streams
- Useful addresses
Introduction
Welcome to the 2001 International Meteor Organization (IMO) Meteor Shower Calendar. The year promises some interesting Moon-free major showers, but the best southern ones are lost to moonlight along with the Perseids further north. The moonless Leonids may produce high to storm rates again this November, an interesting test for the various meteor stream theories, and skies will also be reasonably Moon-free for checking what the June Lyrids and June Bootids produce in mid and late June respectively. Do not forget that monitoring of meteor activity should ideally be carried on throughout the rest of the year too, however! We appreciate that this is not practical for many observers, and this Calendar was devised as a means of helping observers deal with reality by highlighting times when a particular effort may most usefully be employed. Although we include to-the-hour predictions for all the more active night-time and daytime shower maxima, based on the best available data, please note that in many cases, such maxima are not known more precisely than to the nearest 1° of solar longitude (even less accurately for the daytime radio showers, which have only recently begun to receive regular attention again). In addition, variations in individual showers from year to year mean past returns are at best only a guide as to when even major shower peaks can be expected, plus as some showers are known to show particle mass-sorting within their meteoroid streams, the radio, telescopic, visual/video and photographic meteor maxima may occur at different times from one another, and not necessarily just in these showers. The majority of data available are for visual shower maxima, so this must be borne in mind when employing other observing techniques.