Abstract.
We report results from two station, short-baseline (< 100 m) high resolution measurements of faint meteors (limiting meteor magnitude +9) with the goal of measuring their optical trail widths. Meteors were observed using two 0.40 m Newtonian telescopes (field of view ˜0.4 degrees) equipped with image intensifiers. Both telescopes were vertically oriented in a fixed mount and pointed to the same field of view. One system used a gated image intensified camera allowing the transverse velocity component to be measured. The widest trail captured, out of a total of 34 common events measured by both optical systems, had a full-width to half-maximum of 1.37±0.71 m. The widest trail overall was captured by the gated system only, and was found to have a full-width of ∼ ∼10 m. The brightness variation across this trail was found to be best represented by a Lorentzian. Most trails were smaller than our resolution limit and hence we could only place upper limits on their optical width. These were generally less than 1 m after correction for instrumental effects. Four meteors were found to have heights near 65 km and very low transverse velocities. These may be indicative of a largely unreported high density asteroidal component at these faint meteor magnitudes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Ashley Faloon, Kyle Hill, and Leslie Rogers for their help with observing and meteor detection. Robert Hawkes and Peter Brown acknowledge funding support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Peter Brown wishes to thank the Canada Research Chair program of NSERC for additional support for this project, and acknowledges equipment funding support from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.
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KAISER, N., BROWN, P. & HAWKES, R.L. OPTICAL TRAIL WIDTH MEASUREMENTS OF FAINT METEORS. Earth Moon Planet 95, 579–586 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-005-9024-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-005-9024-z