(meteorobs) Strange Lightcurves

[mark_vornhusen]

Wayne,


> The second is a little less clear (pun intended :>) There seem to be
a lck
> of visible stars along the meteor path, and the brightness difference is
> not as great; could be the meteor passed a contrail or some other narrow
> cloud? 

No, there are no signs of a contrail or other clouds. I uploaded the
original video of the first one: 
http://www.parhelia.de/storm/2007/vid_20070910_013826.avi (you need
VLC Media Player for this file)



> Can I ask these questions? First, would these be from the same shower?
No, I don't think so, because the direction of the meteors is quite
different. The camera was pointed nearly in the same direction on both
nights. The timestamp in the filename is the time of the meteor
(YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS UTC).

 
> Second, related to my first guess on the second one, where were these
> taken? Do you have low enough light pollution that a cloud would
appear as
> a hole in the sky (typical of really dark sites) or is it more like
here,
> where coulds are bright bands across the background dark sky?

The sky is quite dark here. I'm in an altitude of 1150m on a mountain.
However, there are several cities near by and usually clouds appear as
bright objects with the meteor camera.

> 
> Finally, can you make any magnitude estimated with the experience on
your
> system? Might help the interpretation.
The brightest stars are around 5mag. The starfield is in the
constellation of Lynx. 

Maybe the meteor has changed its color from e.g. red to green or blue
and then to red again and the camera has a very different sensitivity
for theses colors and this is why the meteor appears dark for a moment? 


Mark