The reports and science data on the 2000 Leonid meteor shower are rolling in, with some observers reporting more than 200 shooting stars per hour over parts of Europe, Africa and the Americas.

"I could see plenty of Leonids from downtown Boston," reported a reader on Saturday morning after a break in cloud cover briefly revealed clear skies. "One meteor was even brighter than the Prudential Building!"

This year's Leonid meteor shower consisted of three main episodes lasting several hours each. There was a modest flurry of 50 to 100 meteors per hour on Nov. 17th, followed by two more outbursts of 150 to 450 per hour on the 18th.

For many North Americans the times of greatest activity coincided with local midnight when the constellation Leo was lying low on the eastern horizon. Normally, low-hanging radiants are bad news because they make shooting stars hard to see. In this case, however, skywatchers were treated to a vivid display of Earth-grazing meteors. Earth-grazers emerge from just below the horizon and streak through the upper atmosphere nearly parallel to the ground. They often display colorful halos and long-lasting trails stretching 90 degrees or more across the sky.

The bright Moon was not a serious impediment to meteor watching as many feared it would be. The Leonids were bright and they tended to streak far from the shower's moonlit radiant.

At 2:45 am Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, the Moon was high in the sky when Marjory Moeller of Atol, New York peered out her bedroom window. "I was immediately rewarded by a long yellow meteor coming from the east," she said. "Incredible sight! It would have been scary if I hadn't known what it was!" Minutes later, Jeannie Moorhead of Warwick, New York said, "I saw an incredible fireball explode as white as the Moon -- it left a very thick trail that remained in the sky for at least five minutes."

"I never expected a shower [to be] this good with the Moon up," said Ted Nichols of the Astronomical Society of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. "During one 15-minute interval, I counted 45 meteors!" Altogether, he saw 275 shooting stars between 10:30 p.m. on Friday and 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, local time.

Bad weather was a problem for some, but fortunately more Leonids are on the way. The triple-peaked character of this year's shower appears to confirm new research that predicts powerful Leonid meteor storms in the future.

"We're very confident that Leonid storms are coming in 2001 and 2002," said forecaster David Asher of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. "Peak rates during those years should reach at least 10,000 meteors per hour when Earth passes through debris streams from Comet Tempel-Tuttle."

Asher and collaborator Robert McNaught of Australian National University drew attention last year when they predicted the onset of a Leonid meteor storm over Europe within minutes of the time it actually occurred -- with previously unheard of precision.

As mid November 2000 approached, meteor watchers were anxious to learn if the dust stream models developed by Asher and McNaught would work again. It seemed to be a testable question because -- according to the models -- Earth was heading for the outskirts of three debris streams. Expectations were tempered by the fact that the expected encounters were not very close. Earth would pass half a lunar distance (LD) from one stream and 0.3 LD from two others. Researchers suspected that these might be great distances compared to the average width of a dust filament. If the outer reaches of the debris fields were rarefied, observers might see very little meteor activity or possibly none at all. (Note: 1 "lunar distance" or LD equals 238,617 miles, or 384,000 kilometers, the average separation of Earth and the Moon.)

The doubters became believers by day's end on Nov. 18th as skywatchers reported strong meteor activity during all three encounters. Indeed, the future looks bright for Leonid meteors. In mid November 2001 Earth will pass almost directly through three more Leonid dust streams. Observers in the Americas, east Asia, Australia and the Pacific Ocean will be favored for a good display. Even the Moon is expected to cooperate -- its phase will be nearly new, affording dark skies for observers.