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Re: (meteorobs) Anyone else see Xi Draconids?
At 03:44 PM 6/24/97 -0400, GeoZay wrote:
>I don't know what to make out of it...I haven't seen anything
>looking like June Lyrids either. Is there any rationale for a genuine
>radiant to jump around for some reasons from year to year like this?
The following comments might be considered to be somewhat off-topic from the
main interest of this reflector, which is visual meteor observation. But
they might also, I think, provide access to a possible additional source of
data.
As a radio amateur, I have been conducting daily high-speed morse code
schedules from my station in central Massachusetts to another station in
central Kentucky. Invariably, we have encountered dozens of radio meteor
"pings" (that is, very short-lived trails that reflected our signal between
each station of less than 1/2 second long) each morning (except Sunday)
during our schedule which took place between 0715 and 0730 EDST, with as
many as a dozen bursts per morning (longer "pings", typically from 1/2
second to as long as 1/2 minute on several occasions).
The interesting thing about our observations is that we have written
records, albeit crude, of how many reflections we heard each morning; the
numerical data can be plotted as the number of reflections per day for the
great-circle path between our stations to "guesstimate" when minor meteor
showers might have had a radio reflection peak. This information might help
to determine when a particular minor shower, such as the Xi Draconids, might
or might not have peaked because you should be able to calculate the
possible area of the sky where the meteor trails that caused our reflections
had to have been at the time, and compare that against data obtained in
years past from visual sightings from which the radiants were estimated. Our
data could be considered the same as radar reflections except our data might
not be nearly as accurate in terms of reflection counts (because of the
variation in reflected signal level for each station), nor as extensive
because of our limited "observation" time of only 15 minutes each day. But
it may be better than nothing!
There may be other such sources of radio reflection data, such as from Ilkka
Yrjola and other observers (particularly in Europe, where amateur radio
meteor scatter work seems to be much more popular than in North America) who
maintain continuous radio meteor observation systems; however, many of those
systems are located in Europe and so often appear to experience different
rates of reflections than I and others in North America have observed in the
past. I would not be surprised to hear that some of the observations of
apparent yearly variation in radiant locations might be different for Europe
versus North America.
In any case, I wonder whether there are folks here in NA who are performing
serious radio meteor reflection observations; and whether those observations
are being combined with visual reports by anybody?
Steve Harrison
Amateur Radio Station Ko0U/1
Shrewsbury Mass
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