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Post by BillW on Aug 20, 2014 19:33:33 GMT
Hi All,
I caught a nice spectrum last night.
Did anyone catch a bright meteor at 020902 this morning? Probably low to the north east for most of you to the south of me.
Cheers,
Bill.
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Post by BillW on Aug 21, 2014 19:55:41 GMT
Hi,
A typical rocky meteoroid, Magnesium and Sodium prominent with possibly a Silicon line present.
The big lines to the right are O and N in the atmosphere.
Cheers,
Bill.
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Post by BillW on Aug 21, 2014 19:58:11 GMT
Hi, A typical rocky meteoroid, Magnesium and Sodium prominent with possibly a Silicon line present. The big lines to the right are O and N in the atmosphere. Cheers, Bill. Attachments:
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Post by stewartw on Aug 21, 2014 21:16:12 GMT
Hi Bill,
What a really nice result - great work! Let's hope you get many more - I know you've been plagued with inclement weather. Alas I didn't capture this one - have asked the team but as yet no one has claimed a capture ... I do have a coverage gap to my NE where I think this one sneaked in ... have most of the hardware required to deploy system #4 but I'm already drowning in data to analyse!
Cheers
William
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Post by BillW on Aug 21, 2014 21:37:02 GMT
Hi, Thanks. Got the bit between the teeth as it were. The radiometery is a bit tricky with meteors! However as a first approximation using a 10000K calibration (basically Vega!) correcting for the continum and dividing through yields..... This is what the "true" brightness of the meteor spectrum should be (ish  ) Attachments:
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Post by BillW on Aug 22, 2014 8:16:10 GMT
Hi All, Now I've had look through some reference material at work, the line I've got as "Si(?)" is possibly a Calcium line. Not only is the radiometry tricky so is just identifying the lines!  Cheers, Bill. |
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Post by stewartw on Aug 22, 2014 12:49:10 GMT
You'll need to start firing a laser up into the sky to excite a few atoms (sodium, like the big observatories do for their adaptive optics) and hence have a calibration line :-)
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Post by BillW on Sept 8, 2014 20:22:57 GMT
Hi All, Been getting a good haul of spectra. Unfortunately most are quite faint. Even the faint ones can be presuaded to show some basic detail. This was a low res capture from earlier this morning. Big spike at zero wavelength is the actual meteor, the "zero order" image. It shows the usual Magnesium and Sodium lines of a stony mineral.  cheers, Bill. |
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Post by BillW on Oct 11, 2014 17:59:50 GMT
Hi, Here's another synthetic spectrum and the instrument corrected graph of the suspect Southern Taurid from the other night. Due to the shallow angle of the meteors' path to the grating axis there are many artifacts in the colour spectrum that aren't real. Comparing this to the one above you can match up the sodium and magnesium lines (the yellow and green lines) and see that this one has a lot more additional lines in the blue from other metals like Calcium and Iron. cheers, Bill. Attachments:
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Post by BillW on Dec 8, 2014 10:46:07 GMT
Hi It was nice to see the JBAA printed my short note about meteor spectroscopy. I had hoped it would encourage more observers to have a go. Unfortunatley the size was a little small, space was an issue. Here is the "production copy" of the sporadic fireball spectrum. (For registered users only, click on it for full size.)  I think this one looks pretty good and shows what can be done with a fairly limited resolution system (Plus a significant amount of luck though!). Cheers, Bill. |
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Post by BillW on Dec 19, 2014 9:53:34 GMT
Hi, I thought I had posted this here but hadn't! A collection of meteors.  cheers, Bill. |
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Post by BillW on Dec 23, 2014 20:20:00 GMT
The novelty still hasn't worn off. The family tree continues to grow....  Cheers, Bill. |
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Post by Meteorman on Dec 25, 2014 15:08:09 GMT
Nice results! Congratulations!
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Post by BillW on Dec 29, 2014 19:21:11 GMT
Another one (spectrum was faint, so a bit noisy) with the brightest line being ionised Magnesium and bright Iron lines. Ionised Calcium is also present. The varieties seem endless....   A not so tidy graph but showing the lines.  |
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Post by BillW on Jan 5, 2015 10:30:51 GMT
With the start of a new year an accidental look backwards.... Having a few PC issues during the Quadrantids I was looking through an old drive and I found spectrum number ONE. I had a paper copy but I thought I had actually lost the images. So I'd backed it up after all (and completely forgot about it)  Watec 1, 12mm f1.2 lens, 300 groove/mm grating and only at 320x240 resolution.   Little detail and at that time I had no idea what I was looking at but I can remember how pleased I was at just knowing it worked! cheers, Bill. |
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