(meteorobs) Curved traces

[Paul Martsching]

Maybe the wake (or trail or streak) following the meteor is doing what ever, as the meteor comes down thru the atmosphere, with varying density of air and direction of high altitude winds.  Maybe the wake propagates more on one side than the other for a little ways and then it propagates more on the other side???  At the distance of a meteor the amount of motion would have to be a lot in order to be seen from the ground so any change in the motion of the meteor itself could not possibly be noticed.  But perhaps the wake may be distorted extremely quickly by various forces??  I am very reluctant to write much on this subject.  When I wore glasses observing on very rare occasion I would see a meter that seemed to curve slightly, but I just thought it was because of my glasses and my extreme astigmatism.  On two or three occasions I have seen a meteor wobble - apparently corkscrewing.  One has to be very careful about eye "motions" even if you are holding your head still.  Twice I have seen negative magnitude meteors that appeared to be corkscrewing nearly head-on.  I don't know if this was real, or just slight circular eye movement??    With all the video meteor recorders going these days, sooner or later somebody should get a good example if the effect is real.

 
On May 2, 2014, at 12:25 PM, Chris Peterson <clp at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:

> I'm skeptical that meteors exist with trails that deviate far enough 
> from linear motion to be perceptible to the unaided eye. The lack of 
> photographic evidence supports that view.
> 
> It is instructive to calculate the force a body traveling at hypersonic 
> speeds experiences in order to produce a visibly curved or oscillatory 
> motion- it is much higher than any reasonable material strength.
> 
> I think anecdotal observations are better explained by various visual 
> artifacts. There are plenty of candidates- projection confusion, normal 
> and abnormal saccades, paired events, head or eye tracking errors. I've 
> personally seen a star or two move suddenly with respect to other 
> stars... and I'm even more skeptical that was real than I am about bent 
> meteor trails!
> 
> That's not to say that meteor tracks are perfectly linear (of course, 
> there's always a tiny degree of gravity focusing). Telescopic views of 
> meteors such as those made by Peter Brown's group at UWO show all manner 
> of interesting motion: fragmentations and aerodynamic or explosive 
> deviations from straight flight. But these things weren't observed 
> before the technology allowed for tracked telescopic observations. The 
> deviations are just too small to be resolved visually.
> 
> Chris
> 
> *******************************
> Chris L Peterson
> Cloudbait Observatory
> http://www.cloudbait.com
> 
> On 5/2/2014 2:19 AM, Pavel Zhavoronkov wrote:
>> Hi, group!
>> 
>> I just would like to know, whether do really exist meteors with curved traces ?
>> 
>>  I'm very interested about this question because a few days ago - 21 April -  I really saw such meteor with very curved trace: it has changed trace on approximately 130 degrees ! - it trajectory almost reversed. It was very like on a tennis ball, which  jumped aside from wall. It's color was blue and probably it belongs to Lyrids shower.
>> 
>> Earlier, I already heard a few similar reports about such traces from several absolutely different observers - on my opinion, it didn't on a mistakes or optical illusion...
>> 
>> 
>> Pavel from Northern Russia.
>> 
>> Clear skies!
> 
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