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(meteorobs) LEONIDS 11/16-17/97 (Nice!)

Joseph A. wrote:

>>> ps.  Im really enjoying all the LEONID posts..  I gotta into that radio
    meteor stuff.. sounds like it yields some good quantitative data..
    However, unlike visual, it must be pretty hard (or impossible) to make
    shower associations with such data...<<<

Joseph,

With radio methods, meteor *patterns* become evident. Specific shower
meteors will raise above background sporadic rates and daily baselines.
Also time of day can distinguish shower meteors.  For example, a shower
that is strong at midnight local time will stand out because normally there
are few background sporadics on a non-meteor shower night. A radio meteor
observer may get 20 meteor reflections at midnight on a certain normal day
but on a certain shower night there might be 120 reflections at midnight so
a pattern shows itself so you can roughly figure that 100 of those
reflections were shower meteors that night.

Also correlating with fellow radio observers is important.

Speaking loosely, for the Leonids at my location, Nov 16 at 3:00 am local
time there was good activity but on Nov 17 at 3:00am there was major
activity with all sorts of patterning, like fireball clusters and such. Jim
Richardson wrote also of head echo qualities as distinguishing features.
There could be a lot of research done in this regard using multiple radios
in a forward scatter array for distinguishing general radiant direction,
especially for full-on daytime showers.

So you cannot radio trace an individual meteor back to a specific radiant
(by forward scatter) but radio meteor work can detect passage through
subtle debris belts and faint dust ribbons and there are radio showers that
visual meteor observers can be looking right at directly but never "see"
due to limits of human standard issue eyeball sensitivity.

It seems like the visual observers on this list could learn to put together
an elemental $100. radio setup with FM radio and easy to set up portable
yagi and travel to a rural radio quiet site and monitor mooned out
important shower times or possible predicted outbursts. 

**Listening** to plasmatic meteor reflections at the high ionosphere is a
thrilling sensory experience.

Enjoy,
Tom Ashcraft