by Chris Peterson » Fri Aug 25, 2023 6:25 pm
JoeP wrote: ↑Fri Aug 25, 2023 1:47 pm
Does it seem odd that all these 'meteors' look relatively the same? Same direction; mostly the same length. The night I observed, they came from the same general direction but some were slow and were more radially coming at me with some that were appearing in random directions.
Same direction makes perfect sense, as they all point back to the radiant, which is in the Milky way on the opposite side of the sky. We can see here that the trails aren't quite parallel, but converge on a vanishing point outside the frame. We're seeing a fairly narrow FOV here, quite unlike when we're out observing a shower.
There were several active showers, but the Perseids were the dominant one, so it's possible no non-Perseids were in this field over the 2.5 hours of exposures. Or, non-Perseids may simply not have been included in the final stack.
The uniformity of length isn't too unreasonable. Trail length is very dependent on distance from the radiant, with trails getting longer as the meteor is farther from the radiant. Over this fairly small section of sky, we might see most meteors having similar trail lengths.
[quote=JoeP post_id=333229 time=1692971259]
Does it seem odd that all these 'meteors' look relatively the same? Same direction; mostly the same length. The night I observed, they came from the same general direction but some were slow and were more radially coming at me with some that were appearing in random directions.
[/quote]
Same direction makes perfect sense, as they all point back to the radiant, which is in the Milky way on the opposite side of the sky. We can see here that the trails aren't quite parallel, but converge on a vanishing point outside the frame. We're seeing a fairly narrow FOV here, quite unlike when we're out observing a shower.
There were several active showers, but the Perseids were the dominant one, so it's possible no non-Perseids were in this field over the 2.5 hours of exposures. Or, non-Perseids may simply not have been included in the final stack.
The uniformity of length isn't too unreasonable. Trail length is very dependent on distance from the radiant, with trails getting longer as the meteor is farther from the radiant. Over this fairly small section of sky, we might see most meteors having similar trail lengths.