Meteor Network

[Hugh]

Thanks Rick

I'll look the article up.

Hugh

[Rick]

I didn't catch this one on my camera as it was too cloudy here, but a couple of cameras under clearer skies did:

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2021/orbits/202110/20211025/20211025_195532.146_UK/index.html

Note the eccentricity of the orbit. It's another sporadic inbound from interstellar space.

[Rick]

These automatic cameras are collecting a lot of data which allows meteoroid orbits to be calculated, and that will, among other things, help identify new showers.

The Global Meteor Network announced one such discovery yesterday evening:

On October 24, the GMN cameras in Europe recorded an outburst of an unknown meteor shower. The peak was very sharp, most meteors were observed within a period of 30 minutes.

You can read more about it here:
https://www.meteornews.net/2021/10/28/october-zeta-perseid-meteor-shower-ozp01131/

The meteors were on a very interesting orbit - it looks like they were pieces of a sunskirting comet which probably disintegrated a long time ago, and they only now reached Earth after returning from the Oort cloud.

Thanks to everyone for their hard work and contributions, no other smaller regional network could have observed this shower.

[Rick]

The meteors were on a very interesting orbit

It wasn't a particularly good night for UK meteor observers, but a couple of cameras did catch one of the meteors in the newly-identified cluster, and you can see the UKMON orbital analysis here:

https://archive.ukmeteors.co.uk/reports/2021/orbits/202110/20211024/20211024_221256.783_UK/index.html

[Rick]

One of the weak points in the Raspberry Pi setup is its use of an SD card for main storage. Provided you get a good one this is not usually too much of a problem, but when things do go wrong the troubleshooting can be interesting...

A couple of nights ago my camera seems to have had more than the usual number of detections*, and this caused the SD card to hit the stops. At some point the Pi froze, and then got re-booted. It then entered a rather strange state, where the SD card was in read-only mode, but it was running in an overlay filesystem mode. This makes it look as if file changes are taking effect, but when re-booted it's back to square one. I went through that cycle a couple of times before realising what had happened. Unfortunately, the SD card itself seems to be stuck in read-only mode. This is a known failure mode, and is at least slightly better than being stuck in write-only mode, as at least this way you can get the data off...

Mwanwhile, it is clearly time to get a new SD card, and re-build the software. I think I will also get an SSD and use that instead of the SD card for all the data directories.

* Friday 5th November... I wonder why... (Err... No I don't**).
** A pity, as the four previous nights were cracking nights for meteor detections, with six or more active showers and over 70 meteors each night.

[Rick]

The necessary bits arrived, and I've re-built the system today. It's busy looking at the clouds at the moment. ClearTonight.com doesn't give it any chance of spotting any meteors, but maybe a small hole in the clouds will drift past at the right time...

I now have the software and system files on a new rather smaller SD card, and the data is going to a USB3 SSD. At least that way, if the data disk fills up then it won't kill the system. I've not yet worked out thether the original SD card is permanently read-only, or whether it can be revitalised, but until I'm happy the new system is behaving I'll keep the read-only version of the old one around.

[Hugh]

Hi Rick

Re your previous link below from 29/10:~

"You can read more about it here:
https://www.meteornews.net/2021/10/28/october-zeta-perseid-meteor-shower-ozp01131/"

I don't understand any of the technical stiff but do really like your input and the reports.  In the link above, images 9 and 13, also showed like a series of white blobs elsewhere in the sky - would these have been satellites which the recorder was catching?

- Hugh

[Rick]

Hi Hugh,

Re your previous link below from 29/10:~

"You can read more about it here:
https://www.meteornews.net/2021/10/28/october-zeta-perseid-meteor-shower-ozp01131/"

I don't understand any of the technical stiff but do really like your input and the reports.

The "heat map" display is using "Sun-centred geocentric ecliptic co-ordinates", which is a bit of a mouthful, but means that the ecliptic (the plane of Earth's orbit) is represented by the horizontal line through the middle, and the top and bottom points are perpendicular to that plane. It's a projection useful for giving an idea of objects' orbits. The various blobs indicate the number of meteors coming from that particular direction, so a very bright spot indicates a direction from which a lot of meteors were coming. That map is for one 24 hour period between (about) noon on 24th October and noon on 25th October. The brightest spot is the Orionids, and other known showers are identified by little rings. (Here's a table of abbreviations) The yellow arrow points at a cluster of meteors without a ring round them, which is the suspected new shower.

In the link above, images 9 and 13, also showed like a series of white blobs elsewhere in the sky - would these have been satellites which the recorder was catching?

In the photographs lower down, the meteors are usually slightly tapered trails with a more or less noticeable head. Satellites, if they vary in brightness, usually do so in a symmetric manner. Aircraft confuse the issue further by having flashing lights, so you end up with bright dots on the trails. All the trails are interrupted at intervals by the camera's electronic shutter. Fast-moving objects have longer dashes and fewer breaks. Satellites and aircraft are usually much slower than meteors, and the system knows that and usually ignores them, but there's often more than one trail on an image, so parts of aircraft and satellite trails often appear on images with meteors. At this time of year aircraft are the main photo-bombers. Figure 9 has a very obvious aircraft trail at the top, Figure 4 has one close to the meteor, and Figure 13 has one at the bottom. The last is from a different type of camera, and there's also evidence of interlacing on the image.

At other times of year, common photo-bombers are moths, bats and birds.

Possibly the most common source of artefacts is internal reflections from bright lights (including the Moon). My camera gets interference from various neighbours' rottweiler lights...

[Rick]

Yesterday's BAA Webinar (available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/eAGyNELqqIM ) was about the recovery of the Winchcombe meteorite earlier this year. It gives quite a bit of detail about various meteor-monitoring networks.

[Rick]

...and last Friday's BAA Radio Astronomy Group webinar was also about the recovery and analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/zgGRL15RgEw