I am working toward the AL’s new Radio Astronomy observing program. I have
bronze level certificate and silver is in the mail. Gold remains a challenge,
but I’m still at it.
One of the five tasks in the AL program is detecting meteors by radio. I got
that to work fairly easily using the NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts. It turns
out that both Tucson (Mt Lemmon) and Flagstaff (Mt Elden) use the same
frequency, 162.400 MHz, and neither can be heard directly from here. A meteor,
during the day, through clouds or even on a clear night, lets me hear just a
second or so from one or both of them when their signal reflects off the
meteor’s ionization trail, which dissipates fairly quickly.
In my case, I redirected the audio through a data acquisition device to my PC
running “oscilloscope” software. Ten screen shots of an “event" was enough to
qualify. At Mike’s all we’ll need is a “beep.” I’ll keep track of the count the
same way the visual observers do, and we can compare totals afterward.
By the way, I have a book titled “Handbook for Visual Meteor Observers,”
published by the International Meteor Organization. It has the official forms
and all the post processing procedures that we might go through if we want to
actually submit our results.
This should be interesting...
Alex
On Jul 22, 2015, at 9:14 AM, insanas (Redacted sender "insanas@xxxxxxx" for
DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's great, Alex. Can't wait to see your radio equipment. Have you used it
before? And can you count meteors even if it is cloudy?
Take care, Sam
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
-------- Original message --------
From: Alex Vrenios <axv@xxxxxxx>
Date: 07/21/2015 8:16 PM (GMT-07:00)
To: pasmembers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [pasmembers] Re: Perseids meteor shower at Mike's
I’ll try to come up with a radio-meteor count, for comparison.
Alex
On Jul 21, 2015, at 6:53 PM, (Redacted sender "insanas@xxxxxxx
<mailto:insanas@xxxxxxx>" for DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
I have mentioned that we at PAS can try to do some astronomy science
projects. Next month at the Perseid meteor shower at Mike's we could try to
do a meteor count. The editors of Sky and Telescope on August 20, 2012
listed several projects that astronomy enthusiasts can try. One was a meteor
count. I found a free app for my Android called "The Perseid Meteor
Counter". I then installed it for free on my Galaxy 5
Samsung phone. It gives instructions on the project, requires a reasonably
dark site (Mike's should do being around Bortle 4.5), reasonably clear
horizons, and use of the app that has buttons for starting the count and for
pausing the count and continuing the count and ending the count. You also
press a button when a meteor is spotted and it is recorded and sent to a
central processing center for analysis. It sounds like we could have fun
trying it where we sit in a group and people shout when they a see a meteor
and then a person with the cell phone can press the button. If a mistake is
made, an oops button can be pressed to cancel the
sighting. There may be other apps available for Iphones or laptops or Ipads.
I've never done it before but am willing to bring my phone to see if it
works. If anyone else has done something like this or has other ideas let us
know. Take care, Sam
