[The last renewal of this page: Nov. 18, 2001]

The system for film cameras for constellation and meteor :
Vixen's Sensor Equatorial for a mobile observation + Skysensor 2000, with a plate for pan heads, for PENTAX 67(60mm X 70mm film size) and Nikomat(35mm film size) + Sigma 8mm/F4 fisheye lense tobe mounted.





Nikon Nikomat (35mm size) + Sigma 8mm/F4 fisheye lense.

We traveld to the mountain area at northwest of Gumma prefecture in the autumnal foliage.
We arraived at the place in a dark after the sunset. We immediately started observations.
The weather forcast expected the bad weather in all over Japan, but we were so lucky to have the beautiful perfect sky in most of the country.
The place we selected was a mountainous region at more than 1,000 meters (3,000 feet) above the sea level, and the sky was so dark that the Milky Way was visible very clearly. There was nothing else more than keeping our fingers crossed that the Dr. David Assher's theory is correct.
Till the midnight, we have seen almost none, and we were getting irritated with anxiety.

The peak has been forecasted to come in two stages due to the difference of the mother orbits, such as the first one at 02:31AM on 19th, and the second one at 03:19AM on 19th, and the time when we recognized its sign was at 11:24PM. An orange colored weak light bursted into view from the low altitude of the eastern sky, which continued flying straight all the way.
It was a streak of light just like an artificial satellite.
The light was flying to the south deviating its brightness a little bit and disappeared over the mountain at the horizon.
It was a very strange spectacle which we had never seen before.
It was obviously the first wave of Leonid Big Meteor Swarm which was caused by reaching to the mother comet's orbit from the direction of the Leonid which still stayed under the horizon, therefore the meteor arrived above our sky cutting and slicing the atmosphere with extremely low angle from the sideways.

Meteors started to shoot frequently afer the midnight.
Oh, yeah, it's comming absolutely! Everybody convinced the comming of the maximum.
Time started to pass very quickly since then. Tremendous numbers of Meteors started to dance boisterousy at almost the expected time, and the stirs arose and queer voices were raised interminably by many people there, nearly one hundred people.
At the peak, multiple Meteor shoot every second, and there were many cases that three Meteor shoot in parallel at the same time.
There also were big fire balls which even made a shadow of myself on the ground!
There were many people who abandoned taking pictures, and just looking up the sky with unbelievable excitement.
It is true that after all, peoples became hoarse.
It was obviously a big Meteor shower which reached to several thousand to one ten thousand per hour.




This is a picture composed with 10 pictures before and after the second peak. Due to the fisheye lense, the largest fireball which dropped a clear shadow of myself to the ground was also captured.
I had been very mcuh impressed by a picture taken at Modora Observatory in the Czech Republic in 1998 with a fisheye camera, and therefore I choosed the same lense this time. I was very lucky to be able to get a picture which I had been imaging for a long time.

In the third year since 1998 which the Meteor Swarm was expected in Japan, at last, the dream came true!



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