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(meteorobs) Blue Pre-Meteor Train
Alastair McBeath, VP of IMO, and I are communicationg quite a
bit and one of the idems he sent me is something I would like to share
with the group here, I had also suggested to Lew on 4 July that he
post this but he wanted me to do it with Alastairs permission, which I
got the other day, so enjoy and wonder.
"The dark meteor which ended in a moon-sized Low Luminous Event
sounds not dissimilar to another meteoric phenomenon I came upon some
years ago, first reported by Astapovich from what is now Turkemistan
in 1947. He called these 'blue' meteor trains, and described them as
being seen only from a very high altitude, clear-air site. They
preceded the tracks of visual meteors by some degrees, and were of a
bluish colour. His work suggested they occurred around the heights of
120-160 km (75-100 miles), significantly above the zone where moat
visible meteor ablation occurs. It is unknown wheather the trains were
ablation products, however. They are mentioned, with the main
reference to them (unfortunately in Russian), by his wife Alexandra
Terentjeva in her paper to the International Meteor Conference in
1989('Main Problems of Visual Meteor Observational', A.K. Terentjeva,
in:'Proceedings of the IMC 1989, Balantonfoldavar', eds. P. Spanyi 7
I. Tepliczky, MACIT MMTEH & IMO, 1990, pp.53-57, esp pp.56-57). I
speculated on whether they might be related to dark meteors in my
initial paper on the topic in WGN. Best wishes, Alastair."
Alastair sent me the papers and the high altitude observational
station wasn't that high, about 7300 feet, something we can do in many
areas of the U.S., but the note didn't give much of a hint of the how
rare the sightings were, some years they didn't have any and in others
only a few.
Dave English
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