There is a down side to sitting in an observatory looking at a tiny piece of the constellation Coma Berenices. All sorts of things are going on in the rest of the sky.
Last night a meteoroid entered the atmosphere above the eastern portion of the Florida panhandle. The reported flight path matches the apparent path seen in the video captured by my SkySentinel camera. It looks like the meteoroid entered the atmosphere due east of the observatory at a very steep angle. It was just visible through my eastern tree line.
Based on the number of fireball reports (220) to the American Meteor Society (AMS) lots of people were looking at a larger portion of the sky than I was. (event 1439-2019). But the ones with the best view of the fireball showed up less than a minute later. Wait for it…
There will be several visible events this coming week. Two for everyone and a couple more for those of you on the Florida panhandle.
We have two excellent ISS passes this week for those of you in the panhandle. The first will be on the evening of the 12th. The station will clear the horizon at 18:09, travel from the NW to the SE but drop into the Earth’s shadow high overhead about 18:15. Watch for it to redden as the station experiences sunset.
The second ISS pass will be on the evening of the 15th. The station will clear the horizon an hour earlier at 17:09, once again travel from the NW to the SE and drop below the horizon at 17:19. Notice how close the ISS will come to the Moon. In fact, for some of you in a very narrow path, the ISS will cross the face of the Moon (a transit).
For everyone else the items of interest are the comet 46P/Wirtanen and the Geminid meteor shower. Comet 46P/Wirtanen is a periodic comet (hence the P in the name) that orbits the Sun every 5.4 years. This time the 3/4 mile wide comet will close to within 7.1 million miles of the Earth on the 16th. That’s roughly 30 times the distance to the Moon. I have annotated the location of the comet on each of the ISS charts, however, it will be much easier to see later in the evening as it gets higher in the sky. It will be highest at 21:50 on the 12th and at 22:02PM on the 15th. Notice how much it will move between the 12th and the 15th. It has been reported to be naked eye visible now but you will still need a dark clear sky to see it. Binoculars will make it a bit easier. It will look like a faint fuzzy ball. Photo’s just barely show a tail so I don’t expect to see one visually.
You won’t need binoculars to see the denizens of the Geminid meteor shower. The shower is already underway but predicted to peak around 04:00 (CST) on the morning of the 14th. As usual for meteor showers, a dark clear sky is needed. Just find an area with as much clear horizon as you can, get comfortable (read warm clothing) and look up. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky. Right now the shower’s radiant clears the horizon about 18:30 PM and is high overhead by 02:15. The darker the sky and the higher the radiant, the better your chances will be to see some of the meteors.
The Leonid meteor shower was forecast to peak yesterday around 1700 but that doesn’t mean the shower is over after that. The year it is expected to be active until the 23rd or so of November. The meteor shower is known for its fireballs and my Sky Sentinel camera caught a nice one this morning at about 0453.
As you can see it came in quite steeply and generated only a short trail before exploding.
The 2018 Perseid meteor shower was the perfect opportunity to test my equipment and procedures for full sky imaging. I had previously set up the camera in my backyard but the trees severely limit my FOV and the light from the base keeps the sky pretty bright. The Munson observing site the EAAA shares with the NWFAA would have neither of those limitations and the addition of the meteors would provide a more accurate evaluation of the camera sensitivity.
I started the run at 2046 (L). I’ve annotated a copy of the first still image to show the 3 classical planets that were visible along the southern horizon. Venus had already set below the western tree line. The lens I currently use for the all sky view is designed for a 1/2″ sensor camera. My camera has only a 1/4″ sensor which is apparent by the cut-off Big Dipper. A sizeable portion of the sky is not visible due to the lens/sensor mismatch. North is at the top of each picture.
The evening started with some high clouds but ended up fairly clear. Along with several meteors there were a lot of aircraft. My personal meteor count was 69 but that included several meteors that were not Perseids. Meteors not aligned with any known shower are called sporadic meteors.
This is an assembly of 2,251 10 second images taken on the evening of the 12th of August and morning of the 13th. The images are played at 0.1 seconds per frame. A quicker video (0.03 sec/frame) is on the Facebook page.
After several hours of Earth’s rotation, additional constellations and objects were visible. Of note is the constellation Perseus (the namesake of the meteor shower) and the Andromeda galaxy just visible as a smudge on the night sky. Although I have viewed the Andromeda galaxy naked eye before, Monday morning was the most prominent that I have ever seen due to Munson’s lower light pollution.
Lessons learned from this outing:
Extend exposure time to at least 20 seconds to increase the signal to noise ratio. That will also half the number of exposures I have to process.
Look for a 1/2″ sensor camera to avoid wasting FOV.
Look for a more sophisticated dark frame algorithm (note the peppered appearance of the clouds early in the video.
A quick check of the SkySentinel camera detections on Saturday night (the 18th) showed this bolide well to the west of the PTO. I checked the American Meteor Society web page the next morning and the fireball log showed an event (AMS 688-2017) at the approximate time with a list of 70+ reported observations. I am still working on posting my detections on the AMS video page, but am having problems. I think the problem is with the format of the videos created by the SkySentinel application.
