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Re: (meteorobs) Alpha Triangulum meteors & flashes: bright and faint



At 06:56 PM 1999-09-09 -0400, you wrote:
>        I sent Robert L. an e-mail a couple of weeks ago concerning my
>own high rate of brief flashes at my site, which, like Dave seemed to
>indicate, seem to occur in tandem with meteor rates i.e., few meteors
>seen, few flashes seen.  Yet the obvious thing to me seems that they are
>only faint meteors out of my direct field of view.  I can even tell that
>some of them move in a certain direction. Given that I expect there to
>be many more +6 meteors than +2's,  and the flashes occur in conjunction
>with higher meteor rates, most of the ones I see simply must be very
>faint meteors.

I often see these kinds of faint flashes myself while not concentrating on
watching the sky; then when I purposely look upward to watch for more, they
don't seem to appear anymore. So I've considered them half-and-half: some
actually faint meteors, some just eyeball-glitches or brief manmade-light
reflections on the lens of my glasses as my head rotated.

>       I only record +6 meteors if they occur DIRECTLY in my line of
>sight, and I'm almost as proud of actually seeing one as I would be
>having seen a -6.  I have discounted literally dozens and dozens, if not
>a couple hundred, of these flashes so far this year.  The interesting
>thing is, when my friend Johnny is with me observing, he can often
>confirm the same flash I may have just seen, proving to me at least they
>are not optical artifacts.

When I observed for the very first time last fall with Lew, that was also
my reaction. Then he seemed to buckle down and began seeing more than I
did..... ;o)

>     I have yet to feel any real fatigue so far this year

Ain't youth grand.... ;o)

SteveH
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