I spent many an hour just laying back and observing the stars at the Okie-Tex star party this year. And its amazing the difference a really dark sky makes for meteor observing. If you check the Clear Sky clock for Kenton Oklahoma you’ll find the light pollution is listed as class 1 on the Bortle scale. Hard to get much darker than this.

One gets lost when they first gaze on a sky this dark,  the number of stars you can see is overwhelming.  You can’t find familiar constellations!  And if you patiently watch for awhile you’ll see a consistent stream of faint meteors. Most of these are sporadic in nature but occasionally you’ll get a member of a meteor shower.

Such was the case when I saw my first Draconid meteor Wednesday night. A bright one it slowly streaked across the NW sky. Not only did it come from the right spot it had the tell tale slow speed. Awesome. Despite the nearly full moon and poor timing I’ll be watching tonight for more Draconids. Suggestions are they could have an abnormal peak ZHR and these kinds of events are a bit unpredictable. Nobody knows what you’ll see but you have to go out and look.

Update: A Draconid outburst did occur just as predicted. Had one been in Europe or Asia it would have been a very nice show, even with the moon out! I also note that the actual peak is close to what Meteor Shower Guide calculated +/-  1 hour.

The 28th Okie-Tex star party ran from September 24th through October 1. I’ve attended twelve of those years at Camp Billy Joe and this year seemed the driest. Like all of Oklahoma the area has been in exceptional drought conditions. It looked and felt like it.  Yet dry conditions are a good thing for astronomy, low moisture means clear skies.

The forecast prior to the event was very promising: clear every day. But an odd thing happened, we got stuck in a weird weather pattern being partly cloudy the first nights of the star party.  Visual observing was possible  but not astrophotography.

This picture from Sunday night shows clouds obscuring the milkyway (click to embiggen).  I did find it interesting to watch the clouds cross the sky. They were black, something you only see where its truly dark. Fortunately that pattern changed.

Tuesday was our first night clear until the end of darkness. The morning Zodiacal light was an excellent sight. My last night, Friday, was the best night sky I saw all week.

Pictured on the left is my scope setup ready to go as the moon sets (click to enlarge).  By the early morning hours, around 4:00am, we had the darkest of skies. But a few hours before that I had big trouble with my equipment. I stopped tracking, unbelievably my RA motor had malfunctioned. More amazing though is I had a spare motor with me and fixed everything inside 45 minutes. Talk about being prepared.

I’ve got many hours of imaging time invested in one target, LBN524. Just starting to process that data and I hope to have an image soon. This year I ended up in exactly the same spot camping as last year. Interestingly I had the exact same neighbors as last year. Good company, decent weather, dark skies, it was a good star party.

The latest version of Meteor Shower Guide has been submitted to the App Store. Awaiting approval it should be released by the end of the week. So what’s new?

Calendar Events: on each shower detail page is an Alert button that when tapped inserts an all day event into the default Calendar. This event has two alarms set, one and two days ahead of the meteor shower peak day.

Catalog rollover: at the end of the meteor Catalog list is a new item that increments the meteor shower list to the next year. This is handy and also eliminates the need, as far as I’m concerned,  to save a starting calendar year for the app.

IAU Numbers: the meteor shower data set has been updated to include the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meteor numbers. While reviewing all the data I found two showers had incorrect IMO codes, this was corrected.

These new features combined with a few internal bug fixes brings Meteor Shower Guide development for the iPhone to a stable point. The next big phase is the design and creation of an iPad specific version that takes full advantage the screen size. But before that even gets started its almost time for the Okie-Tex Star Party!

Update 09/14: Apple approved version 1.2, its available in the app store now. Everybody should update their copy.

A faint little comet has been cruising through the milky way the past weeks getting just a tad brighter each passing month. Pictured on the right is Comet Garradd taken Sunday night from my backyard, click image to enlarge or click here for big version. This image is cropped from original size taken with my 40D using a 200mm lens. A crisp cold front moved through over the weekend clearing the night sky.

Its about 17 days before the Okie-Tex Star Party, time to tune up my gear.  Everything went pretty well so I’m fired up and ready for dark skies in western Oklahoma.

Version 1.1 of Meteor Shower Guide has been uploaded to Apple and waiting for review. It will go live the moment they approve it. This release fixes a bug in the advanced catalog selection, can’t believe the error got by in the first place.

New in this version is a small bar graph to highlight a showers relative strength. I’ve also tweaked the catalog font  so major meteor showers stand out a bit more.

The Perseid meteor shower peaked last weekend and I never saw a one! Interesting to read the reports on the meteor observer list, seems the intensity was a bit lower this year.  Frankly I’m not sure how you can accurately judge the shower by eye with the full moon out.

The wait is over, early this morning Apple approved my app. Now the iPhone has a respectable meteor shower reference. You can read a bit more on the support page.

Don’t have an iPhone? An app is available on the Android platform from Chris Wilcox. This has a ‘feature’ I don’t like but understand the motivation for: ads. Another app is available for Windows 7 mobile but I have no idea how well it works or what data it contains (let me know if you try it out).

Obviously I’m pretty biased but I don’t think any other meteor shower app has all the features of Meteor Shower Guide.  Now that version 1.0 is released I can start incorporating new features into future releases.

Last year I searched for a iPhone meteor shower app and what I found was pretty poor.  Pathetic actually. So I decided to write one myself. Thus began a journey that has taken up much, no, all of my spare time the past months.

In the beginning I had grand ideas  carried over from an unfinished web project. Along the way I scaled back my expectations.  I don’t have the expertise yet. Just learning the intricacies and quirks of Objective-C was enough to keep me busy for many months.  This has been fun, I’ve not been so immersed in code and algorithms as this for a long, long time. I focused my attention and skills on a simple goal: write the best meteor shower app.

Over this time I have learned much more than I ever knew about meteor showers.  I can’t even count the number of technical articles I’ve read on them. Sometimes I wonder if that has changed my outlook. Before I simply enjoyed watching them, perhaps trying to capture them in a photograph. Now I ponder how to incorporate various data points into a table, how to quantify the duration of a meteor showers peak, why there is conflicting data on shower timing and intensity.

Tonight though I’m happy to say I have submitted version 1.0 of Meteor Shower Guide for approval in the Apple app store.  The waiting for approval begins.