The Meteor Shower That Wasn't A Meteor Shower

Originally posted by waveguide3
There are too many 'meteors'. The number of 700 per hour was mentioned earlier. Of course that's the calculated rate from this small video frame. In real meteor showers, they appear all over the sky, not just within a small framed area. So, what we have here is a meteor mega-storm. Something unseen since the haydays of the Leonids, when 20,000-40,000 per hour were observed. Such a storm would make front page news worldwide. I didn't read anything, did you?

Just to expand and clarify one of waveguide's points (in principal he is correct on every point he made IMHO) :

The Leonids reached peak rates of around 4000 per hour in the storms at the turn of the century:

In more recent years, most notably 1999, 2001 and 2002, lesser Leonid displays of up to a few thousand meteors per hour thrilled skywatchers.

Source: space.com

Previous to that, there was the famous Leonid storm of 1966 that resulted in rates of around 160, 000 per hour.

For much of the world, this is the best that was seen, but for the western portion of the United States, it was a night to be remembered, as experienced observers in Arizona and California estimated that, for about 10-15 minutes, meteors were falling at a rate of 40-50 per second on the morning of November 17!

In the years following the 1966 display, hourly rates for the Leonids remained high. From 1967 through 1969, observers continued to detect rates of 100-150 per hour. After a return to normality in 1970 (15 per hour), rates jumped to 170 per hour in 1971 and 40 in 1972. Rates returned to normal thereafter.

Source: meteorshowersonline.com

But remember, the video in the OP was purported to be made in early December, not in November when the Leonids are most active. The fact remains though, in recent times there have been no outbursts on the scale that this outburst appears to show. As said before, The Geminids meteor shower is the closest major shower peak to the date when the video claims to have been made, but the peak rate rarely if ever exceeds 200 meteors per hour.

In short, an outburst of meteors on that particular date does not add up whichever way you look at it, and an outburst of the kind portrayed in the original video would have been noticed by others.

[edit on 27-11-2009 by C.H.U.D.]

Originally posted by IgnoreTheFacts If most around here are like you and don't even understand the very basics of things, then why ask for someone who has a profound background to explain something to you as you couldn't possibly understand their explanation...

If you can't debunk obvious tripe like this with even that limited experience then there is no help for you.

It's too bad that you didn't bother to read the thread from the start ITF,

If you had, you would have known that I posted it, and that I posted it because the vid didn't seem kosher to me.

Unilke you, I left the door open for various explanations, excluding none, which I feel is a wise thing to do, at least at an initial stage.

In spite of your insults, I will stick to this approach, because a brick wall may seem like a solid object if you run your head into it, but quantum physics tells us otherwise.

As a comment on the "very basics of things" as you mentioned...



[edit on 27-11-2009 by Heliocentric]

I read the entire thread, thank you. I still stand by my advice, go out and buy a camera (seriously you can get them cheap) and a free/cheap editing program. Play around with it. A few weeks/months of messing around and you won't be tempted to gives rubbish videos like this the attention those that make them thrive off of.

The idiots that make videos like this (not the ones that do it for class projects only to have some loser pirate their work) rely on ignorance to get their jollies. And this community seems to be more than willing to give these utter tools the jollies they crave.