More History

[BillW]

Hi,
Another chance discovery whilst browsing through old files on a pc I'm clearing out.

During a predicted "outburst" of the Ursids in 2007 me an observing friend went to a local dark site to see what we would see.
With a full moon it turned out to be not a lot. Only saw 3 visually
I started with a watec 120N before picking up a 902. At that stage I didn't know anyone else locally (or further afield for that matter) doing the video stuff so decided to try a triangulation experiment of my own. I set up the 120N in the garden and took the 902 with me and recorded onto a tape.

Much to my surprise I actually got two Ursids.



Even over only 20km or so the parallax is clear. The alignment was all just done by eye in photoshop. Took ages to try and understand how to do the calculations long hand.
(This was before I discovered UFO capture/analyser/orbit) I got a mid height of 109km. No idea how accurate that is but at least it's the right-ish value. I think you can put old images through the ufo suite. I'll do it one day....

cheers,
Bill.

[stewartw]

Hi Bill,

Nice one ... always great to see these early observations!

Cheers

William

[arp]

Hi Bill,

That's a nice demonstration!

Some years ago Len and I did video observations of the Perseids across a similar baseline of ~20km, which was sufficient to show the parallax shift but perhaps not far enough for whizz astrometry.

For a couple of our recent JBAA papers I processed some of Len's VHS tapes through UFO Capture and Analyser. It's a bit of a faff - and I certainly wouldn't want to do it on a regular basis! - but it was useful to salvage some useful data from tapes that would otherwise have been archived in the proverbial 'wine cellar'.

Will find my notes and e-mail them this weekend.

Cheers,

Alex.