(meteorobs) Work of the Tican Astronomical Observatory

David Entwistle David at radiometeor.plus.com
Sat Jul 12 05:09:41 EDT 2008


Please find below correspondence received directly from Nikola Biliskov
regarding the work of the Tican astronomical Observatory. For some 
reason, Nikola isn't able to post directly to the list.


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 > There's an interesting article at the following url. Although it is a
 > promotional article produced by an equipment manufacturer, it gives an
 > interesting insight into the meteoric work going on at the Tican
 > Astronomical Observatory in Croatia. An interesting area of work too.
 >
 > Any team Tican team members here on meteorobs?

Although I'm not really a team member, I know very much about this project.
Meteor work at Tican (located 1.5 km on the east from relatively good
known Visnjan) is continuation of the work we started in nineties. It
was the observation of meteors in the VLF/ELF part of the spectrum,
which culminates with great success during the 1998 Leonid campaign in
Mongolia (for those interested in the subject, there is a paper in
JGR: G. Zgrablic et al. J. Geophys. Res. Space Phys. vol. 107, Issue
A7, Art. No. 1124 (2002)
and this also appeared in the Nature's news site:
http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020204/full/news020204-3.html  )
However, some questions after this experiment remained unexplained,
and some of our suggestions need further examination in order to prove
them.
So, one part of our team, headed by Goran Zgrablic and Dejan Vinkovic,
decided to build very sensitive station to measure alterations in
electric field of higher atmosphere due to the penetration of the
meteoroids into the atmosphere. To connect the changes in electric
field with the meteor occurences, the sensitive video system is
developed. This part of the job is well done by Damir Segon from Pula
observatory, who is very familiar with video systems. He used very
cheap but very sensitive cameras, guided by PC to detect motion in the
sky.
This is indeed a part of the so called Croatian Meteor Network (site
is in croatian only, but it might be useful:
http://www.astro.hr/hmm/index.html ). The third part of the system is
VLF/ELF detector, the same which we used in Mongolia.
A few years later (i. e. now), the station is more or less completed.
However, there are some problems, which arise mainly due to the
inability of Visnjan observatory to employ a few scientists, whose
full-time job will be development and maintenance of the station, and
measurements. For now, everything is based on voluntarism of a few
enthusiasts. Having not enough time, I left this project. In spite of
these problems, testing of the electrometer shows very good
characteristics of this instrument, which assures very nice results in
the future.
So, everybody interested in this job is wellcome to join this project.
Nikola Biliskov

-- 
David Entwistle



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