(meteorobs) Chris(Cloudbait) Meteor Telescope?

[Chris Peterson]

Sorry, Larry, it's not going to work. You need a much more sensitive camera 
(probably with an image intensifier), and you need that camera to be very 
high speed, hundreds or thousands of frames per second. A larger aperture 
scope would help as well.

Consider: with your 560mm FL scope, and a typical camera with 5um pixels, 
your image scale is 2.2"/pixel. For a meteor distance of 100km, that gives a 
spatial image scale of 1 meter per pixel. The next big shower is the 
Geminids, which are very slow at 35 km/s. So in a single video frame of 1/30 
sec, the meteor moves over 1000 meters, or over 1000 pixels on your camera. 
Of course, the apparent speed is likely to be less since the path won't 
usually be perfectly perpendicular to your optical axis, but any meteor is 
still going to be massively motion blurred. You will learn more about the 
meteor with a wide angle lens, where at least you have largely frozen each 
frame.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "stange" <stange34 at sbcglobal.net>
To: "Global Meteor Observing Forum" <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: (meteorobs) Chris(Cloudbait) Meteor Telescope?


> Chris & Ed,  Thanks for input.
>
> I have two telescopes that might be able to do the job, but only one heavy
> free camera that is suitable because it is just 0.1 Lux. I do not want to
> use a super-sensitive light camera like my Stellacam II because I want as
> much detail as is possible without light bloom.
>
> The most suitable telescope is a Stellarvue Nighthawk Next Generation 80mm
> F7 (SV 80ED) Fl=560mm, which has already been adapted to fit a Meade
> AutoStar mount.
>
> Now I need to know when the next BIG shower will occur, while I find some
> way to focus mid-atmosphere ahead of time. I will run the camera with
> HandyAvi in meteor trail mode.