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(meteorobs) Re: NWM August odds and ends pt 1
I made a list of posts to comment on leisurely. Here is the first batch.
There is enough for a couple more as I don't want to make this too long for
one gulp.
Pierre:
>I'm pretty sure there wasn't a main body. I clearly saw the "cluster"
>from start to end, and it was all finished in a fraction of a second.
>
>So maybe this was indeed a meteoroid that broke up in pieces before
>it entered the atmosphere? Anybody else on meteorobs ever seen
>anything like this?
The closest I have come to anything like this was a group of 7 Leonids seen
in 1965. They all fit in a rectangle 10 degrees wide and 30 degrees tall,
centered about 60 degrees high in the west, none were simultaneous, none
brighter than magnitude +2, and it all happened in just 4 seconds.
Deborah:
>What do folks use to record detailed information - glow in the dark pens!?
I use a flashlight that gives red light to avoid loss of night vision,
although I minimize its use by just writing in the dark on folded paper.
For plotting it has to be used a lot more. In 1969 I obtained a sweepstakes
game piece which used a small rectangle of red celluloid to decode a secret
message on an otherwise unreadable colored field. The celluloid proved very
useful afterwards. I cut three disks to fit inside the front of my
flashlight -- all three are needed to dim it down to acceptable night level.
These red disks have been remarkably durable, for after 32 years and 3 more
flashlights they are still in good condition.
Jure:
>Why even use a paper, the best thing is to use a taperecorder
I used to do that with a durable recorder bought in 1971 and lasting until
1986. After going through three of the cheap Radio Shack recorders in the
next three years -- all of them defective or quickly becoming so -- I gave
up and switched to folded paper strips. That eliminates the problem of data
loss, as long as I can sort out occasional overlap of writing !
Jure A:
> The second hour started at 20:31 UT. LM was 6.5. Right at the
>start of the period a -1m Kappa Cygnid appeared. Then, only 1 minute into
>the period a brilliant -6m orange Kappa Cygnid fireball lit up the clouds
In all of my life I have never seen a Kappa Cygnid fireball. It's been a
few years since I have done any observing soon after the Perseids. But I
keep hearing about these fireballs and not seeing them myself. There has
been only once I call recall seeing 3 Kappa Cygnids within a single hour,
and seeing 2 has been rare. Typically I don't see any on a given night.
Chris:
>First, stop looking at constellations and see only a random collection of
>stars. As soon as you impose the mental construct of a constellation on your
>visual field, your visual cortex spends time organizing the field of view to
>meet the construct, and your fovea darts around under auto-pilot, checking
>out every star to make sure it fits the pattern. Clear your mind of
>constellations! ... a Zen-like approach to
This would be impossible for me to do. The constellations are permanently
etched into my mind, and they jump out at me any time I look up. In 1960 I
obtained a good working knowledge of the sky in just four months from Miami,
using H.A Rey's book, the best ever written on constellations. At the time I
was in a Messier hunt with a friend, then after switching to meteors I had a
good naked-eye framework to build on. A curious mental exercise is to try
remembering what the sky looked like before knowing any constellations. I
have a few such memories from age 7 to 12.
Malcolm:
>On the perception factors, I've been in groups where I've seen 100+
>meteors and the next highest is about 30, with several under twenty.
This is exactly what observing with Bill Gates (not from Microsoft) from the
Keys was all about. Setting my perception at 1.00, Gates was doing 3.8,
while all the rest of us schlumps were doing 0.8 to 1.2. Gates wondered how
we were seeing so few, while concurrently we were wondering how he could see
so many. Gates would have to consider the other five of us as downright
mediocre. He thought the "great mountain skies of New Mexico" was the key
to his enormous rates, so when he came down to sea level in the Keys at our
"inferior" site, he expected to see no more than the rest of us. It took
only 10 minutes the first night to prove that wrong, for Gates had already
seen 10 meteors while nobody else had seen more than 2.
>enders_gt1@prodigydot net writes:
>
><< I have experimented with the "Zen" mode on occasion - that is to fix the
>eye in one spot near a chosen star and not move at all. This does some
>peculiar things to the retina and perception...
For an occasional creepy experience I stare at a bright star, being careful
not to move my eyes at all, and everything else gradually disappears. The
sky turns blank gray in about 30 seconds. Motion is clearly necessary to
make night vision work at all.
Bob Young:
>I work at a planetarium
>... after my eyes had been dark adapted I sat
>down under a "dark sky", with the meteor projector turned off
>tried a "meteor" count. It was successful!
After hearing about this possibility in 1973 I tried it myself in a dark
living room with a cardboard box over my face. But I failed to "see"
anything. That was my only attempt.
Norman
Norman W. McLeod III
Staff Advisor
American Meteor Society
Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com
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