(meteorobs) singing meteors

[Bruce McCurdy]

    Ed wrote:

>     I'm still an open minded skeptic when it comes to "simultaneous"
sounds
> from meteors!  Until one has a "repeatable" instrumental record of such
> sounds along with a video of the meteor this will be difficult to prove
one
> way or the other.  You will have to have several recordings as it would be
> difficult to confirm the meteor you saw or recorded is responsible for the
> sound, especially during a high rate shower such as the Leonid outburst.
> Radio backscatter systems have this same problem I'm told.

    I too am skeptical by nature re: sounds of meteors, aurora, etc., but I
have a fair bit of experience with radio backscatter. I just wrote an
article about our Sky Scan radio meteor school project for the February 2005
issue of the Journal of the RASC, and the following paragraphs touched on
this:

*******
Our approach was to provide participating schools with a low-tech radio
observatory, capable of making observations of real phenomena in the
physical Universe, namely meteors. The concept is relatively simple (luckily
for me, an admitted technoklutz), and is described in Phil Gebhardt's
article in the RASC Observer's Handbook (Gupta 2004).

Although my keen interest in meteors over the years has been primarily
visual, I had used this forward-scatter technique to observe the Perseids on
a cloudcast night years previously through a "detuned radio" set to an FM
frequency with no local stations, monitoring for bursts of signal from a
distant transmitter. A car radio and antenna work great for this. In recent
years I have taken to conducting both visual and radio observations
simultaneously, a combination I heartily recommend to all meteor
enthusiasts. In my experience radio bursts are about three times as frequent
as visual; the overdense ones produce an extended signal that lasts an order
of magnitude longer than visual ionization trains; it is possible to
experience either without the other; but maybe a third of all visual meteors
are accompanied by an exactly simultaneous radio burst which leaves zero
doubt about their cause. One quickly learns to associate the sound of static
as the aural equivalent of a clear dark sky, crackling with potential.

*******

     If you see a bright meteor after a ten-minute wait and the car radio
picks that exact instant to start singing 'Crazy Train', well it might just
be a fluke. But after that happens a few dozen times, one becomes convinced.
The Law of Coincidences also includes limits. It is not a 1:1 correspondence
by any means, but I am convinced there is a solid relationship. Some of the
radio meteors even 'sound like' their visual counterparts (loudest when
brightest), although I will freely admit this is more of an impression than
a scientific observation.

    regards, Bruce