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(meteorobs) Micrometeorites



>From the material I have gathered in print and over the last four and a half 
months of visually looking at particles through my microscope, I have 
accumulated the following information on particles that seem to increase and 
decrease with respect to known visual meteor activity. 

1. The particles are circular on first glance, but are obviously spherical 
under magnifications of 100x and 400x. At 100x the particle is completely out 
of focus when you are focused on the slide's plane. As you lower the slide the 
outside edges of the particle eventually come into focus and continued lowering 
brings the top into focus. 
2. The particles are reflective. This can best be seen when using a light 
source that is to the side of the slide and not coming up from below.
3. Magnifications of 400x reveals what I call a "folded appearance" for the 
larger particles. From recent experience with my kids' Play-Do, you can 
duplicate the appearance of a micrometeorite by flattening the Play-Do and then 
crunching it up and rolling it into a sphere. Unless you have worked the sphere 
for a long time, the resulting Play-Do sphere has lines across it showing where 
the edges were before you rolled it up. Of course, a bright Play-Do color takes 
away from the micrometeorite appearance.   :-)

I use double well slides for my studies. I don't have a slide with me, but the 
well is perhaps three-quarters of an inch in diameter. I count the particles in 
each well, add them up, divide by two to obtain an average, and then divide by 
the amount of time the slide was outside to obtain a daily average. Because of 
the upcoming daylight meteor showers, I have been putting three slides out each 
day for the last two days--one for 24 hours and the other two for 12 hours 
each. I am hoping to better isolate the micrometeorite peak for the daylight 
Arietids. I can not keep this pace up, however, because it takes at least 15 
minutes to scan each well, and the larger number of particles around the Eta 
Aquarid maximum took me about 30 minutes for each well. 

Gary

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