While You Were Sleeping…Meteor Shower over Alabama
If you haven’t noticed, I love astronomy. And I especially enjoy NASA’s news service.
Funny little story about me. Once, at summer camp for nerds, lying in the grass outside on a college campus, under the stars, I looked up and saw a meteor shower. I was so geeked about it and immediately announced the astronomical delight to the ten or so other teens around me. Everyone looked up in anticipation, and then one guy said, “It’s fireflies.”
Sigh. I didn’t have my glasses on.
Anyhoo, it seems the September Perseids were really fantastic this year.
During the dark hours before dawn on Sept. 9, 2008, a surprising flurry of meteors had showered the skies above Huntsville, Alabama. More than two dozen of them were fireballs brighter than Jupiter or Venus; a few even cast shadows.
Even the tiny Cloudbait Observatory in Colorado saw a good show that morning.
Naturally, this is a composite image of a few hours.
Background on the September Perseids
Named for the originating constellation, Perseus, the September Perseids are not as well-known as the August Perseids, due to the small number and magnitude of the meteors. But every now and then, it seems that the Earth meets up with the dust trail from whatever comet the September Perseids come. When this happens, we see the September Perseids. You can see “falling stars” all the time, of course, but at certain times of the year, the Earth’s revolution comes into contact with a relatively constant stream of comet debris.
NASA has put together a network of systems for finding the origins of meteors at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and at the Walker County Science Center in North Georgia. The network consists of two Sentinel systems. NASA astronomer and meteor expert Bill Cooke explains the Sentinel as “a computer-controlled camera, fisheye lens and digital video recorder. It was developed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario for studies of meteors over Canada, and now we’ve adapted it for our purposes. Every night Sentinel patrols the sky, looking for the unexpected, and it never gets sleepy.”
Why two never-sleepy cameras looking for meteors? Two sources can upload info to a computer and create a 3-D version of the meteoroid and then can triangulate the source of that meteoroid. The first test of the two-camera network on October 1, 2008 figured out that a centimeter-size meteoroid came from the Asteroid Belt. Neat.
Next year, the Sentinels should be able to determine the origin of the September Perseids, but the real reason behind the science of finding the source of meteors is the many things
that meteoroids can impact. Not so much on the Earth’s surface, as most meteoroids burn up upon entry into the atmosphere, but more importantly for satellites, spacecraft, and anything on the Moon, which doesn’t have the protection of a dense atmosphere.
Still, even without the science, meteor showers (or a bunch of high-flying fireflies to a near-sighted person) sure are pretty to look at.
NASA, astronomy, space, comets, meteors, meteor showers, falling stars, Perseus, constellations, September, Perseids, August, Sentinel, Alabama, Georgia, Marshall Space Flight Center, Walker County Science Center, atmosphere, Earth, Moon
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
[...] are way smaller, sure; but as that is not an exact measurement, but you can think of moonlets as asteroid-sized for the most part (as small as 100 m). Moonlets are too small to have gravitational pull in so far [...]