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Re: (meteorobs) Geminids from China (Dec. 14/15 ZHUJI)
Kim,
Thanks for your message.
> It would appear you had a very impressive night of observing during
> the Geminids. I have a very honest curiosity (rather than an obtuse,
> one-line question of doubt) as to your sporadic totals. You have listed 175
> Geminids vs 163 sporadics. That is a high number of sporadics, even given
> that many will be HYDs and what-not. What is your impression of the
> sporadic totals?
Yes, I agree that it seemed that the sporadic seemed too much from my
observations. :) And it also looked strange that the variation of SPO
numbers seems relavent to that of GEM! I don't think that that was from
the weathere variation. It's a great pity that I didn't use plotting -
I'm not familar enough to those fainter stars for a reliable plotting.
There should be some HYDs inside my SPOs, but may not be so much as those
of XORs and MONs - the reason for my not including HYD as one of my
observing showers was that I made a wrong radiant position for that
during the first half of observation... We also saw some HYDs during
the previous night.
I used not wide radiant radius - about 3 degrees (?) - for shower
determination. Meteors far from radiant may have wider close-distance.
For those which could be traced back geometrically to the GEM radiant,
but be far from radiant with too short trail and too slow speed, I
usually recorded them as SPOs. However, these may not happened too
much - I mean that those SPOs with obvious different directions
may probably the large part of my recorded SPOs. Perhaps I need to
record something about the start/end points of the trails of each
SPOs next time.
I just checked my Leonids observations this year, I saw 37 LEOs, 6 LINs,
and 59 SPOs during 2.72 hours on Nov. 17/18. It seems to me that some
new observers tends to include some SPOs to shower members, some may
even don't know exact radiant position before observation. For the
Leonids observation in 1998, I heard that some observer regarded
all meteors which could be traced back to the LEO constellation to
the LEOs. For this year's observation, we have more communications
and sometimes we observe together, which made our shower determination
standard closer - and I always found that new observers may easy to gave
more shower members (from SPOs) when they observe.
This rises to another question about the XORs and MONs during the GEM
maximum. It seems that the XOR members I observed are more than the
one listed in IMO canlendar. I think that it might be possible that
the real XOR, MON, HYD members are underestimated because of the GEMs.
GEM is very good for new observers to start their first meteor
observations, however, because of the close distance of these four
radiants, new observers may not be able to distinguish between the
four, and may easily include all of those to GEMs. I myself am too
busy recently to check whether this could be possible from different
observations reported here, both from 'experienced' observers and
'new' observers, and it's a pity that I didn't have time one week
before the Geminids (the maximum) to get some observation for the
SPO background. But those should be find out from IMO database?
> By the way, I have enjoyed reading your observations this past year. You
> and your observing collegues in China have been quite busy, it would appear,
> please keep us informed of your observations!
It was a great pity that I'm too busy now, so I could only send out
those reports in data format, without any description. We did have
some funny things happened during observations, and saw some quite
interesting meteors which worths to be said in some words. Anyway,
I have some friends now who can observe with me together, and I wish
that some of them could write something when they have time later.
And I'm thinking about to establish a Meteor Society under Beijing
Astronomical Society (functioned as Chinese Meteor Society?), and
I already know many meteor observers in China now.
Merry Christmas to all of you, and Happy New Years!
It seems that our meteor observations would be even better for the coming
years.
Best, Jin
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > OBSERVING PERIODS: 0=none seen; /=shower not watched
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > PERIOD (UT) FIELD TEFF F LM GEM MON XOR SPO
> > 13:26-13:30 E,90 0.08 1.05 6.0 4 0 1 4
> > 13:46-14:00 E,90 0.25 1.05 5.5 7 2 3 3
> > 14:01-14:15 E,90 0.25 1.05 5.9 5 0 0 9
> > 14:16-14:30 E,90 0.25 1.05 5.9 3 1 4 7
> > 14:31-14:45 E,90 0.25 1.05 5.9 10 0 1 14
> > 14:46-14:59 E,90 0.23 1.05 6.0 8 2 8 6
> > 15:00-15:14 E,90 0.25 1.05 6.0 11 0 3 14
> > 15:15-15:30 E,90 0.26 1.05 5.5 5 3 4 11
> > 15:31-15:45 E,90 0.25 1.05 5.5 13 2 1 12
> > 15:46-15:59 E,90 0.23 1.05 6.0 8 3 4 5
> > 16:00-16:14 E,90 0.25 1.05 6.0 13 1 4 6
> > 16:15-16:21 E,90 0.12 1.05 6.0 7 0 1 4
> > 16:24-16:44 S,80 0.35 1.05 6.0 16 2 4 10
> > 16:45-16:59 S,80 0.25 1.05 6.0 15 1 2 7
> > 17:00-17:14 S,80 0.25 1.05 6.2 5 2 2 9
> > 17:15-17:33 S,80 0.32 1.05 6.2 18 0 4 17
> > 17:34-17:45 S,90 0.20 1.05 6.2 9 1 1 9
> > 17:46-17:59 S,90 0.23 1.05 6.2 16 0 0 10
> > 18:00-18:04 S,90 0.08 1.05 6.2 2 0 0 6
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > TOTALS 4.35 175 20 47 163
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
========================================================================
Jin Zhu | Tel.: +86-10-62759888, 62756612 (O)
Beijing Astronomical Observatory | +86-10-62579689 (H)
Chinese Academy of Sciences | +86-314-5054767 (Schmidt dome)
P. R. China | Fax : +86-10-62765031 or 64888731
------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: zj@bac.pkudot edu.cn or jinzhu@sun.ihep.ac.cn
WWW Home Page: http://vega.bac.pkudot edu.cn/~zj
Pager: zhu_jin@263dot net (only Sub. line) OR +86-10-64256688 PIN 82333
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