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Post by BillW on May 19, 2015 15:49:08 GMT
Hi All. With the disappearence of astronomical night that's the end of meteor observing for me this year. I was tallying up my results and found some interesting stats. From Apr 14 to Apr 15 I had 714 hours 5 minutes of "on sky time" This yeilded 105 spectra, BUT that's total time for mutliple cameras. So it needs to be doubled to get the effective total of time for spectra. That is two cameras with gratings on. So ~1428/105 gives 1 spectra per 13.6 hours. Another BUT, there were three big showers Gems/Leo/Qua which gave 40 in total plus 1 southern taurid giving 41 shower spectra. Leaving 64 sporadic/others. Dividing the hours by this number gives a more realistic value of 1 spectrum per 22.3 hours observing. That's actually a bit better than I had thought. However these 105 are everything from the barest detection to tiny fragments in frame. The really good ones number 9! So something that can be graphed over at least 300nm (just what I've caught) and have the main lines identified comes out at 1 per 158.6 hours on average even including the small clusters of good ones (like the QUA's this year). If you exclude the shower good ones it's even less, 3 nice sporadic fireballs. 1 per 476 hours    So the moral is if you ain't got patience don't stick a grating in front of your camera! How has everyone else done....? cheers, Bill. |
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Post by allanuk on May 19, 2015 22:59:15 GMT
Hi All. With the disappearence of astronomical night that's the end of meteor observing for me this year. What does that mean Bill??
A quick tally up of my meteor adventures so far. Starting in Dec 2014 with my first cam and then adding a further 2 as time went on, I have captured over 5,700 meteoroids so far with mags ranging from 5.0 to -5.0. Allowing for some duplicate captures due to overlap between camera fov's, I am quite pleased with that result. It will be interesting to see how many I capture over the rest of the year when I add the 4th cam to the system. I doubt I will get involved with spectroscopy even though it is very interesting. My future plans are to get a scope out again and look for lunar impacts. |
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Post by BillW on May 20, 2015 20:08:22 GMT
Hi, At my latitude ~56N the sun now doesn't go below 18 degrees below the horizon. So I'm permenantly in astronomical twilight for a brief spell, the sun between 12-18 degrees below horizon (at midnight) then around a few weeks either side of the solstice it's even worse with the sun only going down to 10 - 12 degrees (again at midnight). With the 12mm fast lenses the sky is so bright the frame saturates except for a very short time around my midnight ~01:18BST and by the start of June it's too light all the time. It gets even worse for observers further north. However there is the compensation of NLC. So at the end May to end July I switch to my colour cameras and watch out for them. There is our sister forum at nlcnet.proboards.com/ for those inclined... As for lunar imapcts thats another interesting field but from those I've met that make those observations, they tell me patience is a requirement also! But it's got great potential. I don't have the URL's to hand but if you google search for the "International Meteor Conference proceedings" and have a dig about you should turn up some really good material on strategy and techniques. cheers, Bill. |
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Post by BillW on Jun 2, 2015 13:11:04 GMT
I was looking through some back editions of the IMO journal WGN and I came across an article entitled "results of 10 years of photgraphic meteor spectroscopy" (WGN 33:1 pp 21-22) This reminded me why I never caught any on emulsion either! Over ten years only FIVE meteor spectra are described. Some of these are partial and even lower resolution that the video ones. Makes the 105 I caught last year look down right miraculous!  Maybe 9 good ones isn't so bad after all..... |
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Post by allanuk on Jun 2, 2015 20:27:15 GMT
Well considering you have been trying out new equipment and learning along the way, I reckon you did good. Just wait for this years results. It should get even better.
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Post by BillW on Jun 3, 2015 18:48:26 GMT
Hi Allan, I hope so! I don't know if you have seen this www.springer.com/us/book/9781441903235But it might be of interest if you are serious about monitoring for lunar impacts. I haven't seen a copy so don't know if it's any good, but the fact that theres now a book about it just shows how far all aspects of meteor astronomy have revolutionised over the past few years! (I don't know if this might be of interest to Alex, chapter list mentions the occulations group that you're involved with) cheers, Bill. |
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arp
Full Member
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Post by arp on Jul 11, 2015 7:36:43 GMT
Hi Bill,
Re the occultations work, many of us discarded recording to videotape a few years ago.
Similar to how UFO Capture saves brief video clips to AVI files, in the occultations community our capture software records directly to a laptop/PC. As well as AVIs, some of the software uses a dedicated format that provides a high degree of lossless compression by only saving any data that has changed in the video stream.
I read the Marshall Lunar Impacts guidelines some time ago. Instead of running software to scan hours of VHS tapes for possible impact flashes I'm sure that UFO Capture could do the job in real time. When set at high sensitivity it records numerous cosmic ray hits, electronic blips and flashes, many of which are as brief as some of the multi-site confirmed lunar impact flashes.
I intended to try monitoring some lunar hits, but this competes with my lunar occultations work - and many of the predicted observing windows were in the pre-dawn hours - too exhausting for me!
Cheers,
Alex.
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