Geminid meteor shower

What a meteor shower, best I've ever seen, unbelieveable!!!

The persieds are now a distant second for sure.
We were up at the Burren site from 6.15 to 10.30, 4 of us from the club, then the fog came in, there were meteors every minute or so, well into the hundreds to be sure!!, some Jupiter+ bright ones and many irridecent trails aswell.
We then went up to the second Burren site by the lake, perfectly clear, it stayed clear up until 2-3 then again the fog came in, but my god!!
All you had to do was look in any one place for a few mins and a meteor would pass through it, there were easily 4-6 meteors per minute at one stage.
One thing to note is that they seem to come along in bunches, you'd get one meteor and there was a high probability of a second one either parallel to it or nearby in the same directrion within a few seconds, it was almost like a heads up warning, at one stage 5-6 meteors in a row did this.
Best I've ever seen!
Roll on the Geminids again next year!

BTW, some great pics there guys!

Mike,
excellent shots!
Tell me, (sorry if you already said)
where did you take these from?

Hi Frank
There were taken from a location near Enfield county Meath. The cameras are fixed mounted on the house and monitor both North and West 33 x 45 degrees areas of the sky. If you are around this side of the country sometime I can show you the equipment and how the system works.
I have a portable version of the system for field work I can show you also, I guess this would have been handy for you guys over the weekend as basically the system does everything from continuous monitoring of the sky to auto trigger recording in three formats at the same time:
AVI, jpg and BMP (I have a lot of meteor videos) while you sit back on a recliner and have a hot tea under the stars!

Clear skies
Mike

Hi Guys
Post analysis of West facing camera meteor events from 11th to 13th December 2009.
190 recorded meteor events in which 142 meteor events are Geminids. The greatest angular velocity of meteor over this time period was ~84Km/s and the brightest was minus 3 approx in magnitude. Ground map showing meteor detection events from observation station, the North camera data not calculated.
Radiant: farm3.static.flickr.com/2665/4200021856_d827f413f7_o.jpg
Ground Map: farm3.static.flickr.com/2766/4200021854_f2f54845f3_o.jpg

FOV: 33 x 45 d
Equipment & Software...
CBC Computar High Speed Aspherical 8mm f0.8 lens
Watec 902DM2S ½” format Video cameras
Canopus ADVC-55 firewire Frame Grabber
SonotaCo UFO Capture V2.22
SonotaCo UFO Analyzer V2.25


Clear skies
Mike

Very good - a question though.
I can see how angular motion can be determined but how do you map these onto distance per second? Are you able to determine radial distance from observer?

I have to say that I don't understand the second mapping though.
It maybe obvious but sometimes the obvious eludes me.

If you liked playing with statistics there are all sorts of analysis you could do with the data and a spreadsheet. For example is there a relationship between number of events and the magnitude of those events (plot scatter graph then add various trend lines).

But as it stands - impressive results.

Mark

Hi Mark
Thanks for your questions, I have only two days under my belt with the analysis software over this weekend and am still taking small steps and learning. I ran some analysis on a number of older clips as a trial run; some meteors could be associated with certain known radiants and of course most meteors were sporadics.
I used the data from the 11th to 13th December because of Geminid activity and was pleasantly surprised to see that most of them were calculated to be as Geminids on the trail map; of course the margin of error from single observation station is higher. Correlation would be much more accurate if two or more stations about 90km apart were utilised.
After setting up some important parameters such as camera FOV, camera direction and elevation, observers altitude, Latitude and longitude, etc., the analysis program then imports the raw data from the captured video frames using another software program with highly accurate time stamp and generates AVI, peak hold bmps and Jpgs. The meteor capture software also requires input such as observation location, height, latitude and longitude, camera details etc,
After importing captured data I match the captured data with an inbuilt star map for stars to 10th mag, although my system is only capable of stars to 5th or 6th mag in real time. The software / algorithms then calculate out the following, measure the object position (Az, Alt and RA, Dec); analyze the direction, speed, linearity and magnitude of the moving object. Calculate the distance to the object from the observed altitude and assumed height, detect the meteor stream from the in-built meteor stream catalogue, draw a trail map and a ground map, and draw a field of view of a camera. Measure object’s magnitude by the comparison with stars based on colour temperature; align the field of view against the atmosphere refraction and the aberration in optical systems. Estimate distance, absolute magnitude, radiant point, geocentric velocity from assumed height. You can then output the CSV file for further analysis. I am looking forward to leaning more about the software.

Clear skies
Mike