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)
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.
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.
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.
A Meteor captured by Jim Burchell[/caption]
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.