Quadrantid Meteor Shower - January 4th, 2012

I had a multitude of cameras setup to capture the show including: 2 DSLRs, 3 security cameras and a new Orion all sky camera. I’m glad I had a wide variety of instruments because some didn’t work at all and others worked better at some things and worse at others. It was my first night using the all sky camera and I’m disappointed to admit that it captured ZERO meteors. I’m hoping I had a error in my operation. One of my DSLRs filled up the memory card after only 2 hours and I didn’t realize it till the morning. By far the security cameras picked up the most meteors, totaling 53. I found that most of these meteors were detected between 2-5 am. I also captured the most meteors in the southern skies at low elevations.

Here’s a compilation video of all the meteors captured on the security cameras.

While reviewing the DSLR photos I was disappointed to find most of the meteors caught on the security cameras did not get caught on the DSLR. The DSLR only captured about 8 meteors total, compared to 53 on the security cameras, so clearly the DSLR lens is not catching everything. I did find this nice fireball that left a persistent train that last for a few minutes. Here’s a full zoom image.

Quadrantid Meteor - January 4th, 2012

Here’s a single exposure that caught two meteors within a 30 second period. This DSLR exposure was also caught on video and both meteors happened at the same exact time! I repeated the sequence 3 times in the video.

Double Quandrantid Meteors - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Overall, a strong performance for the Quadrantids IMO and a very great way to start 2012!

Here’s my final composite holding 7 of the best images from the night.

Composite of Geminid Meteor Shower - Dec 13th, 2011

I used a Canon 5d Mark II camera with a fisheye 15 MM 1:2.8 lens. The extra large CCD inside the mark II used with the fish eye lens allows you to capture the whole sky. This really improves your odds of catching meteors! Here’s another Geminid meteor pic which shows the field of view through this system.

Geminid Meteor - December 13th, 2011

Here’s a short animated gif of the asteroid while it is being tracked. The asteroid is the little dot in the center and the long lines moving are stars. Each exposure is 30 seconds long. The asteroid was only a few degrees from the near full moon and it was also pretty cloudy, so the image is hurt by this, but hey, the asteroid is still there!

Near Earth Asteroid 2005 YU55 - November 9th, 2011

Here is a youtube version of the asteroid sequence above, but just with more frames.

Here’s another animated gif of the asteroid. This time the stars are being tracked, so they are stationary as the asteroid flies across the field of view. Each frame in this clip is a one minute exposure.

Near Earth Asteroid 2005 YU55 - November 9th, 2011

Here is a youtube version of the asteroid sequence above, but just with more frames.

Both of these videos were taken November 9th, 2011 between 8 and 10 PM EST using an RCOS 14.5 telescope.

If you are searching for information on the 11/11/11 meteor, you don’t need to worry about 2005YU55. Its gone and won’t be impacting Earth anytime soon.

Here’s a good article about the asteroid with a map of its path relative to Earth and also a 3d video close-up of the asteroid obtained using a radio telescope.

http://news.discovery.com/space/nasa-makes-a-movie-asteroid-2005-yu55-in-radar-111109.html

and here’s a pretty good Australian news program about this asteroid and NEOs in general.

We stayed at a 5 star mountain resort in Greece located in the mountains above Delphi. The first night we arrived, after traveling for over 20 hours I was immensely tired, but the skies were perfectly clear and beautiful and dark and I had to take advantage (i’m glad I did, as this was our only clear night!). Here’s a two minute exposure taken from the deck off of our room after the moon set.

Milkway over Parnassos Mountains - Arachova Greece - October 7th, 2011

The next day we scouted out possible locations to observe the meteor shower including the ancient Greek city and ruins. Here are a few shots from some of our potential locations.

Parnasso Mountains

Road to Delphi

Sanctuary of Apollo

The Sanctuary of Athena, as seen from Apollo’s ruins

Sanctuary of Athena - Delphi Greece

Here are a few more pics of the ruins…

Apollo Temple

Sanctuary of Apollo

Treasury of the Athenians

I explained to Babis Taglis, the owner of our awesome Greek resort, what I was trying to do and he offered to drive around with me and show me some good locations to shoot from. He put a lot of thought into it and took me to some awesome spots. We literally drove to the top of the Parnasso mountain 6200+ feet up!

Babis Taglis - Tagli Resort & Spa

There was a service road to the top made of mostly softball sized rocks with the occasional bowling ball boulder in the middle of the road! At certain points I thought the car was going to flip backward. I pushed the rented Mercedes SUV to the limit. The car barely worked in ‘auto’ mode and continued to stall out trying to get up the hill, but when I put it into dedicated 4×4 it worked pretty good. Here are a few pics from the peak of the mountain.

Parnasso Mountain Peak

Both nights of the Draconid meteor shower were completely clouded out.

Ancient Greek Church

But I did see this cool falling rocks sign…

Falling Rocks - Delphi Greece

Here’s a lucky shot of a bright meteor, low on the horizon. Based on the elevation angle of 8º and assuming a 80km starting point for illuminated flight, this meteor would have been about 569km SE of my location or half the distance between Maryland and Bermuda.

Milky Way Galaxy and Meteor - August 28, 2011 11:28 PM EST

Here’s the meteor at full zoom resolution. At a magnitude of 2.0, the bright star directly above the meteor is Diphda.

Milky Way Galaxy and Meteor - August 28, 2011 11:28 PM EST

Here’s another shot of the Milky Way Galaxy from the backyard.

Milky Way Galaxy - August 2011

The power went out early sunday morning. I finally got a generator on Tuesday. The first thing plugged into the generator was my observatory. I was happy to learn that all equipment and PC fired up and operated perfectly on the generator power.

Milky Way Galaxy from Freeland Observatory - August 2011

We were happy to get our power turned back on Wednesday night. Many thanks to all of the utility workers from around the country who came to the east coast to fix our power lines. You guys are much appreciated! I’m hoping hurricane Katia will be a dud or misses us.

Here is a PDF of the workshop program which contains an agenda and abstracts of each presentation.

Here are the slides from my power point presentation.

For the MDM hunt update I used The Official Page of the Mason Dixon Meteor, as I guide for my presentation.

Here are a few astro photos I took from the PARI site.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd 2011

Nestled inside the Shenandoah Mountains, PARI has very nice dark skies.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd 2011

Allowing for a prominent Milky Way.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd, 2011

Here’s a picasa photo gallery with a few more pics from the trip.

And a time lapse video of all photos taken over the three days.

Perseid Meteor High Res - August 12th, 2011

I think this one may be a small fireball. You can see Cassiopeia in the shot for reference.

Perseid Meteor - August 12th, 2011

Some light cloud cover rolled in but it wasn’t enough to block this Perseid .

Perseid Meteor - August 12th, 2011

Here’s the full sized picture:

Perseid Meteor - August 12th, 2011

The AMS received over 40 witness reports. The initial run through my plotting software was a bit confusing. This is what all of the plotted witness reports look like: (red icon means movement left to right; green icon means movement right to left; green line is starting point, yellow line is ending point)

Green Fireball - February 23rd, 2011

At first glance, this looks to be a tricky fireball. Usually the green and red icons will delineate the flight path pretty well, but in this instance, the green and red icons, don’t help make much sense of the flight path.

One of the biggest challenges with making sense of the witness reports is eliminating the noise (or bad reports). For big events (and small ones) there are always reports that conflict with each other, so its a bit of an art to determine which reports are good and which are bad. To help combat this, I recently added a field to the AMS fireball report form called observer experience. The purpose of the field is for the witness to rate his or her observing experience — 1 = no experience and 5 = very experienced.

I made some changes to the plotting software today so I could filter the witnesses by their level of experience. Here is what the witnesses with observing experience of 2 or higher looks like:

Green Fireball - February 23rd, 2011

Things are starting to shape up a bit, but lets see what the plot looks like with only level 3 observers and higher:

February 23, 2011 - Green Fireball

Now it looks like we have a clear ending point. To determine this we try to find a common intersection among all of the yellow lines.

The flight path, is still a bit unclear to me, but there are two reports on the western side of the track that indicate “Up To Down” movement. This generally means the witnesses’ field of view is usually parallel to the meteors flight path and the meteor is moving away from the witness. For this reason they do not see side-to-side movement. Because of this, my initial estimate is West to East movement, starting in Michigan flying over Lake Ontario and ending on the Pennsylvania-New York border near Addison, Lawrenceville and Horseheads New York.

February 23rd, 2011 - Green Fireball - Possible Drop Zone