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Re: (meteorobs) Strange Leonid...

on 11/25/01 8:17 PM, Dr. Tony Phillips at phillips@spacesciences.com wrote:

> Are you certain about the direction of the meteor?

Pull out a map and check for yourself -- there's no question about my
identification of the star field. It's possible that the meteor isn't a
Leonid, but I'm pretty sure it is. And if it is a Leonid, then there's no
question of its direction.

> According to the 
> photographer the exposure time was between 7 and 12 seconds, pretty
> short.  So whatever happened to the meteor (as a result of a possible
> camera hiccup) I would expect to see reflected in the background stars as
> well. Yet none of the stars seem to be conspicuously doubled or jostled.
> 

Not necessarily; worst case, the optical effect on the meteor required about
one second, which would mean that star images would have an echo perhaps 5%
as bright as the primary image, which could be below the threshold for most
of the stars. Moreover, both eta UMa and zeta UMa show elongation consistent
with some sort of optical doubling. Several other bright stars in the image
do not -- but they're on the side that has no doubling.

If the exposure time was "between 7 and 12 seconds", then the photographer
must have been attending the camera, with concomitant potential for some odd
mistake. I believe that there's some simple explanation, and I'm sure that
it has to do with the operation of the camera, but I can't think of one yet.

Here's a crazy hypothesis for you: what if it's a compression error? Suppose
that the relevant IC was hit with a cosmic gamma ray just at the critical
moment, and dropped a bit. That memory error could conceivably lead to a
flaw during decompression that would generate the error we see. It's a long
shot, I agree, but it makes a lot more sense than two Leonids crashing
together!

Chris

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