The Radio Meteor Project: December Geminids test

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One More Chance: the December Geminids

The early evening overcast skies of the December Geminids meant that there was little chance of getting the needed confirmation of a meteor signature from the all-sky video camera. Both the camera and radio systems ran continuously through the remainder of Friday and Saturday night, the Geminid peak. The collected data was reviewed on Sunday afternoon.

The first radio meteor signal appeared at 2:44 UTC on Saturday morning. Later in the morning, the skies started to clear and the first dual capture on both radio and video occurred at 9:48 UTC (click here for video):

This dual capture was a spectacular fireball almost directly over the observatory. The remainder of the collected data is on the accompanying chart:

Over the course of the cloudy weekend, there were 126 radio captures and 71 video ones. 18 of those events are dual captures matched by time stamp (see next column):

As the brief visual data set on the chart depicts, there are many meteors missed by these two automated systems. Neither system is capable of capturing all of the meteors that appear over the observatory. The All-sky camera has a limiting magnitude of about 3.4, which makes it unable to detect faint meteors that are easily visible by the trained human eye. The Metrec software also ignores objects that are moving at less than two degs/sec. That means that meteors appearing near the horizon are ignored unless they are very fast. Similarly, the radio detection method has limitations. The largest numbers of echoes are observed directly over the receiver and transmitter site, while meteors more than a few degrees off the line between the two, may go unnoticed. While both of these meteor capture systems have restrictions, when they are used in concert they extend the capture rate and aid in the validation of one another's data.

The strengths of these two systems are significant. Both systems run autonomously and at all temperatures and weather conditions. The all-sky camera covers the whole observable sky. It will capture meteors though minor cloud breaks on nights that a visual observer would have packed up and left. It will find meteors next to a full moon that would blind a visual observer. It is never too cold, or tired. The Radio system is similarly unaffected by temperature. Its additional asset is that it is impervious to cloud cover. On dark, overcast nights that render the all-sky camera sightless, the system will still detect meteors and log their radio signatures.

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