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Re: (meteorobs) Blue Pre-Meteor Train (late reply)

At 09:01 18-07-1999 -0800, you wrote:
  "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.
>                               Dave English

Reply from Marco Langbroek via Casper ter Kuile;

Hello,

Sorry for this late reply, I happened to read this only going back through
previous mail.  The high altitudes mentioned above (in the text originaly
coming from Alastair McBeath) are very interesting in the light of recent
findings from our Sino-Dutch Leonid Expedition. It turned out that several
of the Leonids photographed and video-graphed by our expedition appears to
start to iluminate much higher in the video multistation record than on the
photographic record. This is partly due to sensitivity differences (video
captures fainter parts of the trail as well), but the starting altitude of
the video multistation records was spectacular; above 160 km, some even
above 180 km!!!! That is unlike anything we knew.  Dr Pavel Spurny's
explanation (Pavel is an astronomer from Ondrejov obs. in Czechia and
cooperated in our expedition) is that perhaps this initial part of the
video trails is largely due to radiation in near IR wavelengths for which
the  videocamera's are sensitive. Thus, if the trails mentioned in
Alastairs text above start that high, both phenomenon might be connected
and a source for Alastairs 'blue pre-trail' .
The extremely high starting altitudes of the 1998 Leonids will be reported
in an upcoming paper in 'Meteoritics & Planetary Science' and a preliminary
report already was issued at the recent  April conference on the MACSIT
results.

Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society


       
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