From: Chris Duffield, Mojave desert, CA Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 04:05:51 -0800 I enjoyed your article and then drove to the Mojave desert to enjoy the great show. Wow!! Some observations I made among the thousands of meteors I watched over the 5 hours until dawn: 1. More often than would occur at random, I noticed meteors coming in pairs, separated by about 1/10 of a second, clearly different tails (not precisely aligned), but more or less on the same line, with the first one hitting, and then the second one hitting just a litttle farther along the same vector. Were these binary particles? How could they have split before hitting the atmosphere, yet stayed together?? 2. Most meteors radiated from Leo. But a few percent were at very odd angles. I even saw one in the distant north, just above the horizon, that skimmed horizontally (about 45 degrees off from the Leo radial) west for about 5 seconds. 3. I saw about 6 or 10 meteors going in almost the opposite direction, going from west to east, towards Leo. Oddly, several of these were directly overhead, their vectors passing a little to the north of Leo, but closer than to the Big Dipper. These observations made me wonder if some meteors in a storm skim the atmosphere and go into ballistic trajectories around the earth, to enter the atmosphere from odd directions. The chances for this seem slim to me, but how else can you explain these odd direction meteors? I certainly don't see random meteors this often when there isn't a meteor shower, so they are clearly associated with the Leonids. It must be really spectacular to see a meteor shower from the air -- so you can clearly see all the meteors for hundreds of miles in all directions. I'll try to do that in 2099... Were you in the air this time?