(meteorobs) Aurigids on APOD and other links

Bruce McCurdy bmccurdy at telusplanet.net
Wed Sep 5 15:39:23 EDT 2007


Meteor observers will be interested in today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, credited to list member Jeremie Vaubaillon:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070905.html

I'm delighted to see that the airborne observatory got results; I hope that when his life settles down that Jeremie or others on board might describe what was surely an exciting flight. Peter Jenniskens' report here makes a good start: 
http://aurigids.seti.org/

I also look forward with great interest to any scientific conclusions which might be drawn from this year's outburst, which -- thanks to Peter, Esko, Jeremie et al -- was much more widely observed than those outbursts of 1986 or 1994. That the source is a long-period comet is particularly intriguing, for reasons detailed in the pre-shower NASA release here:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/08aug_aurigids.htm

I for one saw nothing blue-green, as suggested in that article. The (few) colourful meteors that I observed were golden-yellow, which seems fairly consistent with other "colourful" reports on the list which mostly tended toward the red end of the spectrum. What does this tell us? 

Bruce
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