Sporadics, night of 3rd-4th January 2024

[Rick]

It's sporadic season, when there are no major meteor showers. This is a tracked stack of the meteors caught on the night of 2024 January 3rd to 4th by my Global Meteor Network cameras. It was a reasonably clear night, with nearly ten hours of clear sky. One camera caught 66 sporadic meteors, and the other caught 67. Neither camera caught any meteors from major showers because there are none at this time of year. However, the Global Meteor Network is capturing a lot of meteor data, and analysis of that data does occasionally lead to the identification of previously un-known meteor showers.


Gallery Link

[Hugh]

Hi Rick

Sorry if this seems a basic question but can I just confirm the data we are seeing here, please?

Although you say from your Global Meteor Network, what we see here is just what your camera(s) have caught in the sky above you on that one night (10 hour period) when no major meteor showers were expected?

Can I also query that the meteors are the lines we see, as opposed to the points of light which I presume are stars?

Thanks

~ Hugh

[Rick]

Although you say from your Global Meteor Network, what we see here is just what your camera(s) have caught in the sky above you on that one night (10 hour period) when no major meteor showers were expected?

Can I also query that the meteors are the lines we see, as opposed to the points of light which I presume are stars?

It's a stack of one night's captures, using only frames containing meteors from my two Global Meteor Network cameras here in Dursley. The stack is done by rotating each frame so that the stars stack as points. It only works well because my two cameras are fairly close to one another. If one meteor has been captured by both cameras then the tracks will be in the same place. You couldn't do a stack like this using results from two cameras any distance apart, as the meteors would appear in different places. It's those differences in view from cameras in different places that can be used to detemine a meteor's path, and therefore trace back and determine its orbit.

Anything in the sky (rather than part of the local landscape, like the trees or parts of the roof that are in the cameras' fields of view) that's not a point is a moving object. Because the stack has only selected frames containing meteors, most of those moving objects will be meteors, but the system may also image satellites, planes, bats, birds, moths, and just about anything else in the sky that is bright enough to be seen. The processing is pretty good at leaving out frames that don't contain meteors, but before I make one of these tracked stacks I also go through the images to remove any the system has falsely identified as meteors. Of course, some frames that do contain meteors could also contain satellites, planes, or anything else.

Satellites and meteors can appear quite similar on the stack, but are usually moving much more slowly, and may last for more than a whole frame, in which case they'll appear to start and stop very suddenly, where meteors usually brighten and fade (if they don't explode). Planes usually look like rows of dots. Bats, birds and moths often have paths that aren't straight.

There are always sporadic meteors. I don't think the meteor flux was unusual on the night in question. It was just interesting because there are no well-known showers at the moment, so all the meteors caught were provisionally identified as Sporadic. If you want to burrow through data (mostly) collected from the UK then take a look at the UK Meteor data archive.

Here are the orbital analyses from that archive for a few of the meteors in this stack:

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2024/orbits/202403/20240303/20240303_193718.318_UK/index.html
https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2024/orbits/202403/20240303/20240303_223548.618_UK/index.html
https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2024/orbits/202403/20240304/20240304_001042.523_UK/index.html
https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2024/orbits/202403/20240304/20240304_031255.648_UK/index.html
https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2024/orbits/202403/20240304/20240304_045110.294_UK/index.html

On each one you'll see a collection of the images that contained that meteor, and a variety of diagrams concerning the orbital determination.