From: Joseph Assmus, San Diego, CA 
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 05:06:43 -0800


...a quick report now.. fuller report to follow..  very windy conditions to
report at our Mt Laguna observing site.. about 5000ft elev, just east of San
Diego in the local mountains.. clear skies, though we all sensed a lowered
transparency.. I observed from 1030pm-0315am (PST, local time).
Saw 81 meteors... incl fragmenting -4 orange Sporadic and a -5 expoding LEO
with a 3.5 min persistent train...
  After some sleep and work, I post my formal obs report.
good night all..



--
From: Joseph Assmus, San Diego, CA 
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:58:35 -0800

As promised.. here is my full  report and visual data from Leonid obs on
what was predicted to be the second peak night of 2003... we arrived to
the mountain site (one of the sites from where Bob Lunsford and I
usually view..  Bob, however chose to drive out to the desert). . The
Mount Laguna area is  ~45-50 miles east of San Diego  at an elevation of
5000 feet.. The whole area is referred to as the Cleveland National
Forest.. and this was much of the recent scene of the CEDAR Fire that
burned 280,000+ acres,  2,000+ homes,  and killed 20 people.   The
Firestorm's fileline  came 4 miles from my apartment complex.. (Yes, I
had my boxes of pics/papers readied, along with my CPU, ready to
evacuate!) .       Obviously it was hard to see, driving up at night,
all of the fire damage .   I  have seen the area by day...  the black
scorch marks (on the pavement) on Interstate-8 where the Cedar Firestorm
jumped 8-lanes of highway.. that, my friends is scary stuff indeed

The psychological effects of living thru this tragedy, notwithstanding,
we went to observe meteors!  To be sure, our site was still suffering
some transperancy problems due to the fires-effects and aftereffects...
We saw NO enhanced meteor activity, but It WAS a night of of great fun
..Even with the leftoover ash.. the Milky Way was clearly visible.. LMs
are typically better on clear nights like last night
(~6.1-6.4)... but I estimated the ash caused only a slight loss of mag..
down to 5.4-5.7 . When the moon came up later in the morning.. there was
a notable drop in mag to about an Lm 5.0-5.3.  We left shortly after
that

We watched casually from 1030-1130pm local time. (I didnt start recoring
data until 1130pm PST local time).    During that time we caught a -4
orange fragmenting sporadic fireball..  in the south sky traveling
easterly, it had a 20-25 deg path length,  was distinctly orange-ish in
color .. It did not display a terminal burst, but 3 fragments broke of
towards the end.. a displayed a beautiful and seemingly quite thick
wake, no persistent  train.   The Taurids were a welcome sight.. My
first officialy records meteor was a beautiful 0 mag white Taurid..
lasting a good 3 seconds..  love these slow travellers...  The other
highlight was the -5 LEO... terminal burst to probabaly about -8.  it
left a train that lasted  for over 3 minutes.. we watched as the train
snaked,. twisted and turned in the high atmosphere.. reminding my of the
Great Leonid Fireball Fest.. and all those trains.

Over all.. a very satisfying night of meteor observring.. below are my
data tables..

I lolok forward to reading Bob's reports form the high desert...