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(meteorobs) Comments
I do not have access to my mail from home and I do not always have a chance to
keep up with the listserv conversations at work. So, since I like the format
Norman McLeod is using, I am going to copy it whenever I have the time, just so
I can stay in contact with everyone.
The possible radiant in Draco has interested me. I have always been interested
in new and minor meteor radiants. I still have the databases that I compiled on
various computers during the writing of my meteor shower book and I will check
through some of them today at work and the rest at home tonight.
The Aries-Triangulid radiant is a radiant I hope NAMN members can look for this
September. George Gliba referred to it earlier as "Kronks shower", but in
reality it is activity that both he and I independently observed and
independently derived radiants only about 10 degrees apart--two very important
points. In addition, Maurice De Meyere of Belgium was operating a forward
scatter radio meteor detector and noted greatly enhanced rates for a short time
on the same date. My search through my existing databases did reveal previous
activity of which the most important fact was that George and I were actually
the third pair of independent discoverers of this radiant. The first happened
on the night of September 10, 1934, when Cuno Hoffmeister (Germany) and Frank
lin W. Smith (United States) independently plotted meteors from this radiant.
The second pair of discoveries was not as dramatic, but involved very similar
radiants being independently plotted by AMS members Jeremy H. Knowles and
Charles E. Worley during the period of September 9 to 15, 1951. Numerous other
radiants exist going back to 1915, and there are a couple of earlier, very
suspicious radiants going back to 1872. I think the reality of this radiant has
been proven, but the key questions that still need to be answered are: 1) Is it
annual? 2) How strong are the activity levels? and 3) What is the average
velocity? It would also be very nice to better pin down the radiant location,
although good radiants are available between the recent observations and the
historical data. The velocity is very important to me because the orbit seems
interesting, especially if the orbit is an ellipse. The perihelion distance
would be 0.22 AU if the orbit is a parabola, or it could be around 0.8 AU if it
was in an Aten-like orbit. Members of this radiant were detected during Zdenek
Sekanina's radio-meteor surveys of the 1960s, and the resulting orbit seems to
favor the Aten-like orbit.
Many of you wanted occasional reports on my attempt to monitor micrometeorite
activity. Bad weather moved in and blocked the Daytime Arietid maximum, but
rates were on the rise before this and they were still higher than normal a few
days after maximum. During the last few days, rates have continued to drop and
are currently at levels comparable to those of February and March. I think I
can make a preliminary conclusion right now which I hope to prove as the summer
progresses. I do not think minor meteor showers can be detected, at least not
from the data I have gathered. I believe a much larger daily sample would be
needed rather than the two half-inch diameter circles I am monitoring. I have
been monitoring micrometeorites since February and I have detected only two
obvious rises to maximum: the Eta Aquarids and the Daytime Arietids. An
extended period of bad weather (mainly windy conditions, but some rain was
involved over a three week period) completely wiped out the Lyrids. I guess one
thing I would like to establish now is how weak does activity have to be for me
to detect it?
Anyway, that's all for now until I can get caught up on my reading!
Gary