Lyrids from the back step
The Lyrids peaked on the night of the 21st into the 22nd, and for once the Moon was on my side. New Moon had been on the 17th, so by the peak it was a thin crescent that went down in the west at around midnight. After that the only thing between me and the sky was the street lamp, which does not set.
The Lyrids are not a big shower. Under a properly dark sky the rate is something like 18 an hour at best, and from a suburban garden you divide that by two or three before you start. I went out anyway, mostly because this was the first clear night in a week and the refractor was still new enough that I wanted an excuse to leave it indoors and just look up.
The radiant is in Lyra, close to Vega, which at one in the morning in April is already well up in the east. I put the deckchair against the fence so the lamp was behind the shed and faced roughly south, away from the radiant itself, because meteors near the radiant have short trails and are easy to miss.
| Time | Lyrids | Others | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01:00–01:30 | 2 | 1 | One Lyrid fast and bright, about magnitude 0 |
| 01:30–02:00 | 1 | 0 | Thin cloud from the south-west |
| 02:00–02:30 | 4 | 1 | Two within a minute of each other |
Seven Lyrids and two sporadics. I counted a meteor as a Lyrid only if its trail traced back towards Vega; one possible eighth went the wrong way and I left it out. Faintest stars visible near the zenith were around magnitude 4.5, which for the garden is a good night.
The bright one at 01:12 left a short train that hung for about a second. That alone justified the cold feet.