Midnight Fireball!

A large fireball lit up the skies over Central Texas Last night around Midnight. (5:00 Universal Time)

Rainy Weather Meteor Radio Pings

Here in Central Texas it's been raining for the last few days and while I love the rain and we needed it badly. It really puts a damper on meteor observing! However it doesn't keep me from hearing meteors! In fact you can monitor meteors in this fashion even during the daytime!

I have my forward scatter setup which monitors a radio beam used by the U.S Govt to monitor space debris. This beam shoots up from Lake Kickapoo in north Texas near Archer City. If you live far enough away from it you cant pick the signal up directly but you can hear it as anything moves through the beam and reflects the signal back down to your antenna. In the Case of meteors this sounds like a "ping" or a "whoop" or even a long eerie whine or whistle in the case of larger meteors.

Here are a few small "pings" I picked up while it was cloudy.

Daytime Forward Scatter Detection

On Aug 31 at 19:16:32 GMT I had a large hit on my forward scatter receiver here in Hawley, Tx.

I've put together a video of the allsky camera video and the forward scatter audio synced to the same time frame. Daytime detections are hard to capture due to the glare of the sun and clouds in the image. I havent been able to see anything in the video yet but everyone is welcome to

 try! I'm hoping someone can see something in this video that I'm missing.

2012 Perseids

This year's Perseid meteor shower put on quite a show here in North Central Texas!

Composite Image: Allsky Camera Perseid Meteor shower Peak Night 8-12-2012

Video Compilation of all Meteor Detections : Perseid Meteor Shower Peak Night 8-12-2012

Large Fireball Over West Oklahoma and North Texas

This evening in the midst of Developing thunderstorms One of the flashes across the sky wasn't lightning! I large Bolide or Fireball came roaring to earth. Reports are coming in from Oklahoma Of sonic booms caused as the fireball streaked towards Earth.

Lyrid Meteorshower forwardscatter radar timelapse

I've taken the last three days of forwardscatter spectrographs and combined them into a timelapse video of the lyrid meteor shower. What you're seeing is a spectrograph display of the audio output from my forward scatter meteor radar. As meteors travel through the radar's beam they reflect a portion of the signal back causing a "ping" sound on the receiver. This audio if fed into software that generates a spectrogram image. These images are saved to disk 24/7. This is the result. It's about 17 mins long. 

As you watch you'll see lines that scroll up and down through the frame. These are aircraft passing through the radar beam. Meteors appear as small blips of color. Larger meteors appear as a bigger smear in the image. Large aircraft reflections also tend to have a larger fuzzy band above and below the main echo. Satellites passing through the beam appear as sharply diving diagonal lines.

Enjoy the show!

Lyrid Meteor shower DirectView camera timelapse

This years Lyrid Meteor Shower put on a pretty good show from my location. At least my Direct View camera

caught a good number of them. 

I've taken all the composite images and combined them into a timelapse video and composite image.  I hope you enjoy them!

 

What is the lyrid meteor shower??

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lyrids are a meteor shower lasting from April 16 to April 26^[1] each year. The radiant of the meteor shower is located in the constellation Lyra, peaking at April 22—hence they are also called the Alpha Lyrids or April Lyrids. The source of the meteor shower is particles of dust shed in the cometary tail generated by the periodic Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher. The Lyrids have been observed for the past 2600 years