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How did people fare with the Perseids? A clear night here in Cheshire – I wrote a few lines on my BAA Members Page.
All the best,
Jeremy
Frustratingly it was mainly cloudy in Chelmsford last light but there were plenty of Perseids around in the gaps. Pictures of a couple of the bright ones are attached.
I led a party of 13 observers from my local atsronomy club (Castle Point Astronomy Club) to a dark site on the east Essex marshes near Dengie. I was mainly clear when we arrived, but as it went dark and the stars began to show so did the clouds.
We gave up at about 11.00hrs BST as it didn’t look like things were going to improve.
However back at home in Southend I had my all sky camera going and later in the night a few holes in the cloud appeared and I caught two decent Perseids. One at 01.38UT, the same one as Nick recorded from Chelmsford and another 6 minutes earlier at 01.32UT. The hole in the cloud was short lived and the rest of the night was clouded out.
Images attached.I fared much better than last year. I sat outside from 23:00 to 00:30 BST and noted some nice bright long-pathed Perseids in the earlier part of my watch. It was great to see a negative mag meteor streak across the sky then watch it again by replaying it on one of my adjacent UFO Capture PCs.
My provisional haul recorded by my video cameras on the night of August 12/13 was:-
Perseids
Leeds_N 123Leeds_NW 182Leeds_SE 164not including good numbers of minor shower members.I’ll put a couple of examples on my BAA Member Page.Alex.Saw 32 Perseids out of 38 meteors between 2115 and 2315 UT on Aug 12-13 (LM 5.1-4.9). Then cloudy. Clearer spell 0120-0151 (LM 4.6) produced 10 meteors, 9 of which were Perseids.
Hi All,
On the night of the peak my various camera/spectro systems recorded 482 meteor and 49 spectra (note, not all Perseids.)
Caught some very good Perseid spectra and am in the process of working through them. Here is first Perseid of the night.
Very strong signature from ionised calcium in the UV. The instrument corrected version “compresses” the other lines to such an extent I’ve just gone with the raw un-corrected spectrum in the graph. But this looks like a nice typical Perseid. Strong 557.7nm from the forbidden O line as usual in the video (not in the graph as it faded at the point I did the line scan) and ionised silicon double at ~635.9nm
Once I’ve got a couple more it’ll be interesting to compare these to previous years.
However, looking past the spectacle of the Perseids, THIS is the interesting one! (I think I’ve said elsewhere the most interesting things will be found in the sporadic population…)
I’ve now caught several with almost identical characteristics. Very slow, no IR lines at all and strong sodium line. (Take a look at Michaels’ post sporadic 3rd May. )
cheers,
Bill.
Hi Bill,
Very nice spectra!
I think I also recorded your Perseid on my Leeds_N camera so I’ll send you my provisional csv file for August – 1500+ meteors so far.
Clear skies,
Alex.
Hi,
Did you happen to get the one at 21.30 (second spectra in my post) I didn’t get the zero order but if others did, then THIS is the one to concentrate on. This is potentially very interesting. The very high sodium signature is generally taken to suggest a recent origin and the fact it’s slow may be significant orbit wise.
It was a beautiful night, I even sat outside with a cuppa and some, of the now legendary (if the twitter response is anything to go by… ;-)) chocolate hob nobs for an hour or so.
NOVEX produced some interesting close ups. A few terminal flares and I was continually surprised by the narrowness of the persitent train. Didn’t get any distorting trains, the mesoshperic winds must have been calm…. I’m thinking I might add another narrow field system. It does produce fascinating results.
The MAD experiment also produced a couple of interesting results. see https://youtu.be/jXZzLsrjqpc
Although I’ve discovered I have a better one, need to upload that next.
A good night.
cheers,
Bill.
I have too many files to work with…! Just discovered I actually have the “unusual one” captured with MAD-ex! Not Definitely not a Perseid but it has a brief terminal flare. Youtube compression doesn’t do it any favours though ;-(
Nah, thats rubbish, I’ll try and get a better resolution one sorted….
This ones a bit better.
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