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(meteorobs) Re: Somewhat unusual (?) telescopic obs.

I wrote:

>> A friend and I went 
>> satellite observing, and during about two hours (2:00-4:00 
>> UTC on Tuesday 6 April) each of us observed two or three faint 
>> coincidental meteors cross the 1-degree field of the eyepiece 
>> of my friend's 8-inch dobsonian telescope.

Thank you very much to Malcolm J. Currie, who replied:

> Multiple sightings of parallel telescopic meteors separated by a short
> time interval are not as uncommon as you might think.  I presume yours
> were travelling in parallel paths. 

I think maybe I ought to clarify one thing that I wrote that was 
somewhat poorly worded.  I didn't mean that the meteors were 
coincident, but only that we saw them by coincidence (while 
observing satellites).  So what we each saw were two or three 
single meteors during whatever our Teff was within a two-hour 
session of satellite observing.  In each case most likely the 
telescope was pointing in a unique direction.

I appreciate very much the explanation of how the telescope set-up 
affects how many meteors can be seen and how they look, because I 
am very unfamiliar with details about telescope optics.  We track 
the satellites, even fast-moving LEOs.  Only a few times in three 
years has a satellite been both so faint and so fast that my friend 
couldn't track it.  (There is some extra difficulty when they go 
through the zenith.)  The most challenging perhaps was one summer 
evening in 1996 when there were 10 to 20 pieces of "Mir debris" 
(i.e., discarded garbage bags or such like) going over one after 
another with not much time between them.  I would read the alt-az 
coordinates, my friend would aim the scope and try to catch and 
track each one briefly.  I think I saw two or three when there 
were somewhat longer gaps between them or if they were bright 
enough to be seen in his very nice 12x80 finder scope.

Most of us satellite observers would dearly love to see a satellite
decay.  Having seen the Perseids a couple of times previously, 15 
or 16 Geminids from the middle of Austin, Texas, one morning in 
December 1996, last Fall's Leonids (WOW!!) and Geminids (WOW!!) 
and three Space Shuttle re-entries (also WOW!!), I'm looking for 
more of any of them (or Lyrids, June Bootids [which we saw by 
accident last June during a star party], Orionids, Quadrantids....), 
as well as decaying satellites!

Aside:  Someone on the SeeSat list has tentatively identified at
least some of what Mr. Cacella has seen from Brasilia as Hotbird 
satellites, comsats which the Satellite Situation Report lists as 
belonging to "EUTE" (EuTelSat?).

Okay, I'll go back to lurking now.

Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexasdot edu - Austin, Texas, USA

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