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Re: (meteorobs) Persistent meteor trains



The longest lasting train I have seen was from an Alpha Capricornid 1976
July 28/29, duration 15 minutes.  It was a  -8m colored white-blue-green
with meteor duration 2 seconds.  The train was bent into a horseshoe shape
after one minute, and the last visible piece had drifted 30 degrees NNE.

Only 5 minutes before the above meteor, I saw a  -6m Alpha Cap with no train
at all.  This one lasted for 5 seconds, colored
white-orange-yellow-blue-green, and fluctuated in brightness for the entire
duration.  1976 was the best year ever for the Alpha Caps : rates to 10/hr
and several other bright ones thrown in.  July 29/30 there was another  -8m
Alpha Cap, white-green-blue with train 7 seconds.  I was observing from the
Florida Keys.

The most complex meteor I have ever seen was one of my earliest -- only
about 250 total to that point.  It was 1960 Nov 26/27 at 530 AM EST from
Miami.  I did not know about the Taurids at the time, but several years
later I realized this meteor was an earth-grazing Taurid from the setting
radiant.  It lasted for 8 seconds, beginning as a white-blue  -1m that took
3 seconds to swell gradually to  -8m.  Then it dropped off to  -5m in 2
seconds, then let loose a shower of  +1m orange sparks with slight
divergence from straight-line motion.  Must have been a hundred of them
stretched over a 5-degree span.  The spark shower covered second number 6.
Pulsing twice between  -5m and  -4m in the last two seconds, it finished by
breaking into three intense orange  -1m fragments which themselves went only
one degree in half a second.  The middle fragment went straight, the left
and right ones diverged at an angle of about 15 degrees either side.  All
disappeared at the same instant.  The meteor began in Gemini and ended near
Corvus.  At second number 4 a sporadic  +3m appeared south of the path.
After it ended, I saw another simultaneous pair of  +3m sporadics no more
than 10 seconds later.  530 AM was a very busy minute.

Sometime in the mid-60's someone else described a similar meteor in Sky &
Telescope, and thought his was a Taurid also.

I did not see a 10-minute train until 1979 Nov 21/22, from a blue  -12m
Leonid nearly overhead.  It looked like a bright comet for the first minute.
Having cloud trouble at the 1998 Leonid max might have taken away a good
chance for a longer train.  A  -12m Leonid seen while the sky was completely
cloudy was the best candidate.  The train was visible for 10 seconds even
through the clouds.  James Lewis Gramer and my wife Joan also saw that one.

Norman

Norman W. McLeod III
Staff Advisor
American Meteor Society

Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com

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