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Re: (meteorobs) The Existence Of Super-Fast Meteors

Sorry for delay in responding.  Other hobbies have been distracting me:-)

I too have witnessed similar phenomenon, both under the skies and on
videotape.  I call them hypervelocity meteors. Unfortunately, due in part to
the nature of my activities and to the nature of these meteors, I'm still
not at the point where I can say they definitely exist.

I work with Hal Povenmire and Florida Tech in recording the summer streams.
For the past 17 years I've been setting up every year starting about mid
July and working through mid August observing, photographing and now
videotaping the Persids, Upsilon Pegasids, Delta Aquarids and anything else
that came across the Great Square of Pegasus.

I'll tell you right up front I'm not any where near as proficient or
educated as many of the others on this list who drive the science of
observational astronomy to the state of the art that it is.  My involvement
has always been centered around the enjoyment of watching nature's wonders
and participating in the mechanical aspect of recording activity with
intensified videocameras.  I hand my data and journals over to others who do
the big brain work.

As I reviewed the videotape for one night in the summer of '90 I believe, on
two seperate occasions, I discovered meteors along the eastern edge of the
frame, seemingly headed west at extremely high velocities.  Their entire
recorded existance was for only one frame, indicating a velocity much higher
than anything else we've imaged.  Persids appear as a dot, sometimes with a
tail, moving across the screen frame by frame.  These are single events, a
streak with a bulge at one end, that flashes on the screen in an instant.
No telling how many I've missed because they're very hard to detect.  At
first I thought I had a tape defect or a recording error but the events are
printed diagonally across the video scan lines.  Not possible if it's the
record head or the camera chip or some eletrostatic interference.

The jury's still out on how to estimate magnitude of meteors recorded on
videotape using image intensifiers but the streaks were at least as bright
as Upsilon Pegasi at their brightest point.  If I recall, only one meteor
was fully imaged inside the frame and it appeared to be about 5° long.  I'm
working from memory because all the data and logs are turned over to others
for further evaluation after every summer session.  If I still had the
tapes, I could run one of these meteors down and snatch it into the computer
for you to see.

Still thnking I had some obscure tape defect, I set about videotaping the
big Persid meteor shower of 1993 and actually saw something that compared to
the videotape images.  The camera gear was recording the Persid radiant but
I was lying on my back looking at the zenith.  The area between the Great
Square and Aries was very clear so I was doing a little minimum magnitude
estimating in between fireballs.  I was looking right at that thin strand of
stars running through the region from Pisces when I saw a flash, an
instantaneous meteor, like a strobe had illuminated a slide with a picture
of a meteor on it.  I started thinking back to the videotape and realized
this was about the same region the others had radiated from.  I kept
watching as I thought when I saw another.  Same brightness, same heading,
almost east/west orientation, colorless, and very very fast.  So fast there
was virtually no indication of direction.

There was so much other activity that night that I didn't do much more than
make an audio note of my observation on the camcorder mic.  Later when I
viewed the video, none of the observed hypervelocity meteors had been
recorded.  At least, none that I could catch in a quick review of the tape.
They're so fast that it's very easy to miss one.

For one reason or another, I've not had the chance to observe any other
hypervelocity meteors since.  Either the summer streams are clouded out,
(like now) or the Moon has interfered but I haven't thouroughly reduced the
video from the last few years.  I'll let you know if I find any and hope to
actually post one to the list.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Fox" <unclefireballmtf@yahoo.com>
To: <meteorobs@atmob.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2002 4:56 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) The Existence Of Super-Fast Meteors


> June 30, 2002
>
> Greetings Meteor Enthusiasts!
>
> This e-mail is in reference to my June 27/28
> observations.   Although I reported seeing not a


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