From: Rick Nolthenius, Santa Cruz, California Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 12:57:32 -0800 (PST) We had a successful night of Leonids observing on Friday night. The counts spiked up out of nowhere about 11:40pm and we were seeing about 2 per minute for over an hour. I have to reduce the tape to say more. The Leonids were almost all fairly bright; magnitude 2 and brighter. Not many fainter ones. Virtually all left beautiful trains. The first 10-15 minutes had some incredible meteors going halfway across the sky - "skimmers?". Took some of my own photos, and logged carefully the positions of all bright meteors and the times. I was not able to do any real observing Thursday night. I did walk out to my deck and stare up for 10 minutes. Not a good view of the sky and not as dark as you'd like; it was in Santa Cruz. I saw just one very faint Leonid. Karl Von Ahnen, in a darker site, watched from 12:15 to almost 1am and saw only 2 faint Leonids and 5 sporadics. From our experience, Friday was MUCH the better night.