Lucky catch

[BillW]

Hi,
Pretty quiet as usual over the summer months at my latitude.
However I did catch what I think is a meteor during my regular NLC monitoring.
The exposure was ~2 secs with my low light cctv camera, I'm sure it's not a plane nor a cosmic ray.
Could be a satellite flare but I can't find any matches on Heavens Above so it might well be a lucky meteor catch.
Although the camera integrates it's a bog standard colour system so it's not intrinsically sensitive, must have been bright to record it.

cheers,
Bill.



PS. Bright star to right of fov is Capella and time stamp is BST, if anyone wants to double check....

[stewartw]

Hi Bill,

Currently at work ... will have a look when I get home tonight.

Best regards

William

[BillW]

Hi,
Jolly good, be interesting to see if you turn up anything.
But there's more....

Last night was gorgeous so I decided to try the longer lens. These images were through the 35mm. I had hoped to get a nice "zoomed" time lapse of the NLC.

I'm genuinely surprised that I can pick up meteors with this set up. Maybe just luck!
I caught 3 meteors
One was a single frame event, the second had an afterglow and the third was really interesting
This is a sequence of three frames of the third meteor.
Exposures ~2 secs with a 3 second interval. From what I can tell about the software the count is from the start of exposure so the frames are separated by 1 second, if you see what I mean.
Anyway they clearly show an after glow (from Oxygen probably) and train.





Cheers,
Bill.

[stewartw]

Hi Bill - have just checked my north facing camera ... alas I didn't get either of those ... was a long shot based on the fact you too were facing north :-(

Hopefully we'll have coverage up there soon ;-)

[BillW]

Hi,

What I find quite unusual is the general appearance of these meteors. The fov is barely 8 degrees across. The events are "real" but I'm wondering if the trains' aren't. I noticed when moving the camera (in auto integrating mode) the brighter stars leave little trails.
Could be the auto settings are leaving artifacts.

When the darker skies return I'm going to try the 35mm lens on one of the Watecs just to see what the meteors look like in such a small fov.

It's all good fun!

cheers,
Bill.