(meteorobs) One night's lessons. Was Re: satellite-oops

dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de
Sun Aug 12 07:39:13 EDT 2012


> Daniel, it was Noss 3-4 aand C. I ran HA for your location
> it showed up as a mag 3.5 pass going through Aquila and Cygnus.
> Either you had the magnitude filter set too high. remember
> HA like most prediction programmes ignore the possible of
> specular reflection.

You nailed it; Ted Molczan and Marco Langbroek have also come to this
conclusion, it was really a threshold problem with the prediction systems.
So you learn something new every day, err, observing night! :-) Regarding
the PER, by the way, I saw 10 during that hour, with a LM of 5.1 and and
low radiant, leading to a ZHR of 60 with large error bars. Alas, the
current IMO ZHR for that time is also 60 (with statistical errors 5 times
smaller, of course): w00t!

The correction factor of 6 is quite big, however, and that fact should be
kept in mind when communicating with the larger public: Yes, the PER reach
a ZHR of 100+ regularly, but no, you will see only a tenth of them when
you observe around local midnight and under suburban skies, even with
perfect weather and no obstructions. So DON'T HYPE the experience for the
average observer! I saw a headline claiming that the 2012 PER would "rival
the Olympics closing ceremony fireworks" - yikes ...

Daniel

http://bonnstern.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/10-perseiden-die-stunde-seltsame-fotos-und-ein-mysterioses-satelliten-paar



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