Caught this brilliant sporadic? meteor in the south eastern sky this evening about an hour or two after sunset.
I was actually chasing satellites with the Mintron video camera but it's always good to get a nice surprise of something else in a frame or two.
Just rested the video camera on the window ledge and ran a cable to the computer and set it to auto capture. Frame integration 128X, gain midway - a composite of two 2.5 second frames to get this shot. Didn't even get off me bum, which is good with this horrible flu.
2 nights ago we had a break in the clouds and I saw about a dozen meteors!
But the one that confused me seemed to be a stationary bright glow and then faded.
What do you reckon the chances are that it was just an ordinary meteor that happened to be heading directly at my direction, hence no lateral movement, only 'at me' movement?
Thinking about it Ken, I'd say there is SOME chance of that happening? I remember seeing one when I was a kid...I honestly though I was dead, it was as you saw...coming straight on with no lateral movement & getting bigger & brighter, but then a few seconds later it started moving slowly 'up' & went wizzing over-head making this crackling fizzing noise! I'll never forget that sight! I'm sure it hit the deck before burning up! My dad & I spent days searching for it where I guessed it may have landed...Never did find anything though.
wow Kevin - thats a really nice meteor I especially like the glow in the last 3rd of the meteors path - bit of aurora (well excited glowing gases anyway- hehe) The minitrons are or at least were a VERY popular imager amongst the meteor nuts - the one of choice for a long time. Digitals of all sorts do a great job on meteors, much better/sensitive job than film ever did. takes a VERY speccy meteor to look good on film. Thanks for sharing!
Ken, those apparent head-on ones are called Stationary meteors, or Point meteors. The best ones I have ever seen were just about all leonids, right in the sickle they can look like little temporary supernova's sometimes. You guys that live at close to proper dark sites crack me up, you must see zillions of meteors every night?
Kearn
Yes the Mintron seems to have very high sensitivity with short exposures. I think this may be one of the best meteor pics I've captured to date. A pity it wasn't colour and higher resolution, but can't have everything! I've wasted entire rolls of film trying to photograph these things.
Kevin, i am a sucker for a bit of an amateur astro mystery, so i took the liberty of examining your awesome pic. I make the bright path of this meteor to be 12-13º in travel length, the bright star in the top of the trees in bottom right hand corner is Achernar at around magnitude +0.4 and the brightest star in lower top left hand corner is Fomalhaut at mag. +1.15. I guess the bightest part of the meteors path would have to be at least around maybe mag -4, especially to have made such an impression on the viewers I suppose? I tried to link it to any showers but couldnt, using the 2.5x distance travelled rule, also couldnt find any known radiants any closer to the meteor on trajectory path (seeing that "fireballs" are sometimes exempt from that rule, due them being able to penetrate deeper and sooner due to larger size of nucleus possibly) I make the point of origin to be very roughly around
RA 20h dec -33, seeing the PA of path in direction of origin is about 284.2 ish.
Thanks for the sky puzzle, they are a great brain tease - who needs crosswords
Cheers
kearn
PS yes we also tried many, many times to capture meteors on film (even had a go at 1600 speed) and had a heck of a time getting much. We spent two mornings once - total of 10 hours trying to get meteors on film/tracking for a composite with 28mm lenses ect. during Eta Aquarids 2003 - got one piss-ant ETA in shots!! course you see awesome ones while rolling film on, or just out of fov of camera LOL they are very camera shy.
Kearn
I think this shot was just a fluke as well. Out of all the video and film I've taken of the sky since about 1980 this meteor is the best of all. It even framed itself perfectly.
So it looks like it was a sporadic then? I must make an effort to capture known showers in the future. I'd like to get one that leaves a smoke trail or one that explodes midair!
Kevin I know how hard it is get such a speccy meteor perfectly in the frame ( my mate barry got a very nice geminid once - but half the meteor is outside of the fov LOL) its like winning the lottery
and yes it must of been a sporadic, but with it coming from the w/n/w in the early evening there is a slight chance it was some sort of re-entry of space junk, a bolt nut/washer/screw or something like that heheh - what magnitude and colour was it to the eye - as bright as Venus?
Those meteors you have in the orion shots are the ones we typically get, if any, too.
wow commetcatcher, thos mintrons look tempting. I was looking at the QCUIAG group and website about video astronomy. There plenty you can do with that little camera especially with the integrate feature.
How do you capture the vide, to tape or direct to pc via capture card?
Kearn, I never saw it visually. I was playing on the laptop when I saw it on the other screen.
Netwolf, you can do it either way but I usually go straight to capture card. Looks clearer that way, but even so the resolution is still poor in frame integration mode and the analogue video artifacts are annoying, even when using super video cable.
What they forget to mention in the Mintron's specs is the resolution is halved in the vertical axis when frame integration of any sort is used. I'm guessing they are doing some sort of binning for greater sensitivity. The resolution ends up being only about 768x288 which is resized to 768x576.
I should read up on the mods that can be done to it.