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RE: (meteorobs) Persistent meteor trains



The Leonid Bolides left so many trains that there was hardly any space
of time that you couldn't see the remains of a train twisting and
turning in the sky during that bolide year.  It was amazing, nothing
before and nothing since like that has occurred.  I remember not seeing
the meteor many times but seeing the train from it for many minutes
after the first flash.  The one that really brings back memories is
seeing the ground light up all around me, the meteor being so bright I
couldn't even begin to estimate the magnitude and watching that
beautiful train which began brighter than the Milky Way and after 45
minutes finally disappeared.  Some of my colleagues watched it even
farther telescopically until they got bored.  It was an awesome night
that will probably never be repeated, although there is talk of possible
Leonid Bolides this year, but its only a slim chance.  I was in the
right place at the right time.

David Stine
Comet-1

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Gruen [mailto:d.gruen@tiscali-dsldot de] 
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2003 10:43 AM
To: Meteorobs
Subject: Re: (meteorobs) Persistent meteor trains 

Hi!

I believe that this is a very nice discussion and 
would like to share my experience on the mentioned
topics.
I have yet to see a really astonishing persistent train
as the longest trains I've seen all only lasted a couple
of seconds. I remember a Perseid with a train that maybe
lasted half a minute, but that was before I started to take
notes on the meteors so I can't say when and if fact can't
confirm it at all. 
This leads to a very interesting point Thom
Morgan mentioned: how to keep record of "your" meteors. 
The best thing would probably be single meteor data 
(including information about train, color and even comments
if possible), both in printed and digital format, but 
especially with high rate showers this is not practicable.
In this cases I usually include a "train distribution"
similar to the magnitude distribution in my reports, that
shows how many meteors of which shower produced trains 
that lasted for <1s, 1s, 2s and so on.
I think that - as this discussion shows - information on the
probability of persistent trains for each meteor shower can
be very nice for amateur observers like me, although
it might not be that interesting from the scientific 
point of view. Comments on the "highlights" of your watch
can also be very useful and nice to read (thinks like this
discussion with all the stories about most wonderful meteors
make me go out and observe in cold, clear nights).
By the way, my nicest "split" meteor was a 0.0m orange 
Kappa Cygnid (15/08/2002), breaking up into (at least)
three pieces, that glowed out in a row.

Greetings

Daniel Gruen
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