Meteor – Crayford Manor House Astronomical Society Dartford

Asteroid 2023 CX1 caught by CMHASD meteor camera on Monday 13th February 2023

17th February 2023

Updated: 19th February 2023

Exciting news!!!!!! An asteroid that had only been discovered in space a few hours before impacting the Earth has been caught by the Crayford (CMHASD) meteor camera on Monday 13^th February 2023 at 2.59am.

It is only the seventh time an asteroid strike had been successfully forecast, in what the European Space Agency said was 'a sign of the rapid advancements in global asteroid detection capabilities'.

Despite all the cloud that was around at the time; our meteor camera managed to capture the small 1 meter asteroid now called 2023 CX₁ as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere creating a brilliant fireball as it disintegrated, lighting up the night sky over the English Channel as it travelled eastward over the coast of Normandy, France. The 3ft meteoroid created an 'airburst' that could be seen across southern England and Wales and in parts of northern France as far south as Paris.

Below is the CMHASD meteor camera video showing the fireball.

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The one-metre asteroid was discovered by Krisztián Sárneczky with the 60-cm Schmidt telescope of the Piszkéstető Observatory in Hungary. It is his second discovery of an impactor,

‘’The fireball event happened at the predicted time (02:59 UTC) and location, with observations mostly from Southern UK and France, but also from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. It is likely that some fragments of the meteoroid may have survived the atmospheric pass and fell somewhere onshore close to the coast north of Rouen, in Normandy, France’’ ref: https://neo.ssa.esa.int/-/new-imminent-impactor-found-by-european-astronomer

Now a space rock (meteorite) from that fireball has been found in northern France and CMHASD are absolutely thrilled. On 15 February 2023 art student Loïs Leblanc found the first meteorite of 2023 CX₁ in a field located in Saint-Pierre-le-Viger.

Update on Asteroid 2023 CX1 aka SAR2667 - YouTube

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_CX1

More news still to follow - so do check back.

98 Geminids captured on camera for the night of the 14th/15th Dec 2022

17th January 2023

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It was a very busy night for CMHASD meteor camera on the 14th/15th Dec 2022. The Meteor camera captured 141 'sightings' of which 126 were meteors including 4 sightings of 2 meteors in the same shot by the camera. Out of the 126 meteors 98 were Geminids; the rest were other classes of meteors including some sporadics.

Meteors, also known as shooting stars, are pieces of dust and debris from space that burn up in Earth's atmosphere, where they can create streaks across the night sky. When Earth passes through the dusty trail of a comet or asteroid's orbit, the many streaks of light in the sky are known as a meteor shower. The 98 Geminid meteors detected by the camera were part of the annual Geminid meteor shower.

For more information about the society meteor camera & project click here.

For more information about the Geminid Meteor Shower please visit the UKMON website at https://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/showers/2022-geminids/

Below are two out of the 4 photos showing the double meteors captured by the camera.

Best Meteors of 2020

3rd January 2021

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Almost 2000 meteors were detected in 2020, we would have had quite a few more but for the cloudy skies in August that limited the view of the Perseid's in August.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800"] 2020 Meteor stats collated by Simon Dawes from data reviewd and analysed by the Crayford Meteor Team.[/caption]

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December 2020Meteor report

2nd January 2021

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December was particularly cloudy, but we still manage to detect 288 meteors, 115 from the Geminid meteor shower.

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Meteor Report for November 2020

8th December 2020

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November 2020 was spent largely in lockdown due to the Corona virus, one thing keeping us from all going crazy is our astronomy and with our remotely operated meteor camera our members were still able to observe and had lots of candidates to look forward to, and it turned out this was our most productive November 'since records began' - ok the records only go back to August 2018 - so was it better weather, is COVID-19 actually space borne and arriving on the meteors, or perhaps it is just a useless fact? Personally I think it has something to do with 5G masts...

Sorry back to the report.

We observed 244 meteors, 39 of them Leonid's and you can watch them all - thanks to our members of the meteor team - without having to wade through all the false positive sightings.

I've embedded the video below, but if your attention span isn't what it was, then just check-out the highlights at the times listed below (if you click on them they will take you to the correct part of he video)

Highlights:

01:50 02:06 02:22 02:22 02:57 03:20 04:00 05:40 07:18 07:50

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October 2020 Meteor report

5th November 2020

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There were 255 meteors captured in October 2020 from 30 showers including 49 from the Orionids. The media hype about the Orionids amounts to nothing however we did record double the number of Orionids as last year so in some ways it was special - although it could have just been cloudy last year...

The video below documents all the meteors we captured in the month.

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Meteor report for September 2020

6th October 2020

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This is the meteor report for the automated meteor camera operated by the Crayford manor house astronomical society Dartford, for the month of September 2020

This month we detected a total of 269 meteors, well over half were sporadic meteors, meteors from known showers only making a minor contribution to the total, the largest identified shower came from the September Perseids but contributed only 22 meteors to the months total

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Perseid Meteor Shower Report 2020

16th September 2020

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The below video is a report for the perseid meteor shower, based on meteors captured by the semi-automated meteor camera operated by the society members.

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Meteor Captured

13th May 2020

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800"] 20200510_161429SD-Edited A Meteor captured by Jim Burchell[/caption]

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ISS and Starlink captured in meteor cam.

31st March 2020

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Member, Gary, identified the ISS and Starlink satellites in our automated meteor cam videos.

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