This is the meteor report for November 2019, by the Crayford Manor House Astronomical Society Dartford.
This month we were plagued with poor weather and this is reflected in the low number of meteors captured.
In total we observed 139 meteors from 29 different showers, none of these showers was particularly active, the most active being the Leonid’s where we captured 19 meteors compared to 55 sporadic meteors in the Month.
It is well known that you see fewer meteors before midnight than after. This is explained by the fact that before local midnight Meteors hitting the Earth's atmosphere must be travelling in the same direction as the Earth, so the relative speed of the meteor to the Earth is smaller, whereas after midnight the Earth is passing through Meteors on the Earth's leading edge, so the relative speed of the meteors are faster, and since the speed the meteor hits our atmosphere affects its brightness we should see more after midnight than before.
My own experience sifting through the meteor candidates from our camera and observing over long periods, suggest this bias should be easy to detect, so now that we have over 15 months of data, I thought I'd see if this bias in observations was real.
The UFO analysis software categorises the meteors into named showers, if a shower can't be identified it is classed as a sporadic meteor. I have only used the sporadic meteors in the analysis to minimise any bias due to known meteor showers.
My (very simple) analysis suggests on average you are 2.7 times more likely to see a meteor after midnight than before, a much larger factor than I'd expected.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Plot showing the number of sporadic meteors per hour over a 15 month period as captured by the Meteor team using the Societies meteor camera. Overall you are 2.69 times more likely to see a meteor after midnight than before.[/caption]
In October 2019 we detected a total of 138 meteors associated with 29 different showers.
We observed 18 Orionids, which was the most active shower in October, the brightest being of visual magnitude -2.8, however sporadic meteors dominated our detections.
Overall we detected fewer meteors this year than in October 2018.
A huge number of meteors were detected in August 2019. August continues to be a bumper month for Meteors, dominated by the Perseid's, but there are many other minor showers contributing to the number detected.
We also had our brightest meteor yet, a magnitude -5.5 sporadic meteor.
If you look at the surface plot (bottom Right) it looks like there were three independent peaks in August.
As the nights start to draw in we have started to see an uplift in the number of Meteors detected. Interestingly the Perseid's - a well known broadly dispersed shower (peaks on 13th August) were the highest proportion of meteors from known showers.
The short nights and poor weather have conspired to reduce the number of meteors we have been able to detect, but we still managed to detect 44 meteors, 30 of them sporadic.
Plot showing the number of sporadic meteors per hour over a 15 month period as captured by the Meteor team using the Societies meteor camera. Overall you are 2.69 times more likely to see a meteor after midnight than before.[/caption]
The short nights and poor weather have conspired to reduce the number of meteors we have been able to detect, but we still managed to detect 44 meteors, 30 of them sporadic.