Perseids again, between the clouds

Perseids: 42 meteors in 2.67 h · limiting mag. 5.7

A year after the night with the fireball, the Perseids came round again with a much worse forecast: broken cloud moving in from the west, clearing occasionally.

Counting through cloud is a bit of a cheat. The rule I use is to note the fraction of the field that is clear in each fifteen-minute block, so the hourly rate can be corrected later. Tonight it varied from about a third to nearly all.

Count

Forty-two Perseids in two hours and forty minutes, with an average of about sixty percent of the sky clear. Corrected, that is roughly in line with last year. The best ten minutes were at the very end, when the clouds finally slid away and I had to leave for the drive home.