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Below is a simple plot of radio detections from my observatory.
Note the peak coinciding with the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower.
Moonbounce also detected, denoted by grey vertical columns.
Regards,
Michael.
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Thanks Jeremy and happy new year to you too.
It’s been non-stop cloud here the past 3 weeks. I had hopes to enjoy some observing during the Christmas, but alas, not to be. I wonder sometimes why radio astronomy is not more popular in this part of the world.
Regards,
Michael.
Nice looking data. For those of us who are ignorant of all things RF, what is Moonbounce?
Also what sort of equipment did you need to accomplish such a good result?
Very nice results Michael.
If this interminable cloud cover continues any longer I’ll feel like giving up video astronomy and setting up an aerial in my garden! British Isles’ weather and optical wavelengths are incompatible.
Yes, I’m surprised why we aren’t all keen radio astronomers. 🙂
Cheers,
Alex.
Hi,
Great result. I always find the moonbounce remarkable to hear/see! (Grant, moonbounce is the term given to radio emissions that are emitted from the earth and reflected back from the moon. The Graves radar is so strong that when the moon passes through it’s beam the signal gets reflected back. If you’re running a meteor monitoring system you can see the echoes as a trace on the display. These reflections also changes frequency vary slowly over time, that is doppler shift, showing the motion of the moon about the Earth!)
It was solid clouds here also. The very high pressure may have settled the weather but the stratocumulus associated with such weather never broke up.
Ive attached a couple of traces from the peak showing the many reflections I got.
Very active for several hours.
Cheers,
Bill.
Thanks Alex, Grant & Bill.
Grant, I suggest reading the following:
https://www.britastro.org/radio/downloads/SkyAtNight/BBC_SatN_HOWTOOBSERVEMETEORS.pdf
Regards,
MIchael.
Bill,
Nice results there. I’m not familiar with HROFFT. Is it similar to Spectrum Lab, in terms of recording a daily log file?
Regards,
Michael.
Well done Michael, that’s interesting data, Was out myself watching for them last night in very dark skies of (Connemara) western County Galway and not one did see in a 90 min session from 11.30 – 0100, Maybe if I waited longer I may have seen some but as you know it can be a difficult shower to observe with the low radiant. Did catch a faint aurora though 🙂
Hi,
HROfft was written in the 90’s as part of a much longer Japanese meteor project, the Radio Meteor Observations. It is fully automatic so perhaps not as “flexible” as spectrum lab but that’s the very reason I like it. I first used it in 1998 but as today, it’s excellent bad weather insurance!
Once you get it set up and talking to Colorgramme it’s a case of leaving it alone. The only time I check the computer is if I see any odd results on the RMOB page!
The one downside is that because it’s designed to be left alone the thresholds are set quite high. It means that it’ll only record the strongest echoes. You can see this in the radiograms. 27 may be the count but there’s probably double that in actual echoes. Also it doesn’t have any way to discriminate against interference so the results can completely misleading if you have a noisy environment.
This is the main site run by Hiroshi : http://www.amro-net.jp/radio.htm
cheers,
Bill.
Very nice radio results. As Alex said the weather this side of the Irish Sea has been pretty rubbish in January so far but I was lucky to get a few hours of clear sky a just the right time on the morning of Jan 4th so picked up quite a few Quads on video. It clouded over around 02:30 so, according to your plot, I picked up the strongly rising activity but not quite the peak.
Not radio either, but had my DSLR cameras on as the worst cloud cleared about 2am.
There were the usual W-E planes and the ISS at 06:05am plus a few shorter meteor trails (both sporadic and Quads).
This bright event at 06:18am was the highlight and continued onto the alternating 30s exposure on my second camera.
Michael, I have only just spotted your Posting and thought it may be of interest to add my two penny worth of Quadrantids results for comparison. I run a program that looks at the Doppler frequency of each recorded event and if the time and frequency correspond to that expect from the Moon it is removed. I don’t have an example for January but I include an example of Moon bounce filtering for March 2019.
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