Perseids maximum 2022

[Rick]

On the night of the Perseids maximum (12th-13th August 2022) my meteor camera recorded 197 meteors over about five and a half hours. Of those, 167 appear from local analysis to be Perseids. This is a tracked-stack of all the confirmed meteor trails recorded that night.



View in O.A.S. Gallery

[ApophisAstros]

Really great Rick ,that bright spot looks like an explosion but the moon i think.
Roger

[Rick]

looks like an explosion

It's a meteor that came to a particularly dramatic end. The camera faces north-north-east, and most of the time the moon isn't in the field of view.

[Carole]

A very interesting collection of Meteors from your group array.

Do you have an individual photo of your own collection?  I would be interested to see that. 

Carole

[Rick]

That's all the meteors that my single fixed camera capured during a single night, with all the relevant frames stacked so that the stars are fixed. Because the camera is fixed, each frame has to be rotated appropriately before stacking, which is why it looks the way it does.

A few nights back Mary McIntyre posted a tracked stack using images from all the cameras she and Mark have at their home site. It covers rather more of the sky than my single camera can manage. See https://twitter.com/Spicey_Spiney/status/1558117274179063811

This morning Mark McIntyre posted a tracked stack of four nights worth of observations from one camera. I guess I could try to do something like that. See https://twitter.com/markmac99/status/1559265363950444544

[ApophisAstros]

Really great Rick ,that bright spot looks like an explosion but the moon i think.
Roger

looks like an explosion

It's a meteor that came to a particularly dramatic end. The camera faces north-north-east, and most of the time the moon isn't in the field of view.

WOW , amazing.
Roger

[Hugh]

Thanks Rick

Always interesting! I am a bit like Carole in that I don't do these watches very much - but that 197 over 5.5. hours is quite a good return rate.  Perhaps next time?

- Hugh

[Rick]

but that 197 over 5.5. hours

The camera is very sensitive, and will be seeing quite a few meteors you simply wouldn't see with the naked eye. There have, however, been quite a few relatively bright ones...

[Carole]

Yes, l have watched meteor showers a couple of times and found them underwhelming, so l don't bother any more.  But seeing something like this is really good.  Been meaning to do a meteor mosaic for some time, just never got around to it. 

[Rick]

Automatic all-hours observing is definitely the most effective way of observing meteors. I find the way that correlated observations can be used to determine meteor orbits particularly interesting.

I guess the next step for me would be to add extra cameras and a radio meteor detector. That's all technically possible, and the new GB3MBA meteor beacon at the Sherwood observatory should be well placed for reception in the south of England...

[Rick]

The analysis of the brightest event is on the UKMon site.

[Roberto]

Really good!  These composite pictures are really interesting.  The radiant is very clear.

Roberto

[Rick]

There's a software update to the tracked-stack generator in the works that should allow several days of records to be combined and filtered for a specific shower. I'm looking forward to trying that out on some of my older datasets.

[The Thing]

Trouble with your lovely meteor composite images is that it makes me want to start yet another project...

[Rick]

yet another project

Aye. This one has, for me, mostly been a "takes a few minutes out of each day" kind of project, though the combination of moonlight and increased bat or moth activity has meant that sorting through the nights images has been a bit more time consuming. However, that ist't an essential part of the process unless you want reasonably clean images to show off, so it can be the kind of system that needs very little attention once it's up and running...