Meteor Shower

[Karen_G]

Anyone else looking for meteors tonight?

We've been sitting in the garden for a few hours this evening, unfortunately we have a lot of light pollution in our area so the view wasn't great, but we did see a few

Here's a link to more info if anyone is interested Perseid Meteor Shower

Karen

[bluesign2k]

Yeh, I sat out for a bit watching
Apparently the "show" peaks at around 3 in the morning, I might set my alarm clock to get up and see it
It's supposed to be really good this year due the fact its a new moon (or summit like that.lol)

[rusty13]

yeah i saw a few just after 11, but was too knackered to stay up any longer cos i had to drive all the way to leicester to do a lambo and aston martin track day

[cheesytoasty]

well i didnt even bother - to many clouds!

[ChadH]

Thanks for letting us know about it, Karen. I hadn't heard, so would've missed it. I had a look at about 3 o'clock this morning, and saw a fair few over the course of a few minutes.

[Karen_G]

Thanks ChadH, I'm glad you got to see them too

I went back outside just after 1am and I saw another 2. Unfortunately with the street light towards the back of our garden we were only able to see the really bright meteors... If I had a long enough ladder I would have put a box over it!!

Roger set up his camera on the off chance of catching one, but no such luck ... we did get a few good star trail photos though Here's one

Karen

[rusty13]

thats just too cool for school karen!

[ChadH]

That is very cool!.

Just a query about the photograph though - assuming the camera was still, wouldn't the star trails be parallel with each other? (Unless you lived on the north or south pole )

Does that mean the camera was rotated?

[Karen_G]

Hi Chad,

The camera was on a tripod and remained still. The star in the centre of the picture is the north star, which is directly above the north pole. The north star is at the top of the earth's axis. As the earth rotates on it's axis, the north star remains still and the other stars move around it ... I guess you could compare it to a spinning top toy... the north star is in the centre of the spinning top, and all the other stars spin around it - Hope that makes sense?

Karen

P.S. No I don't live on the north pole , but you can see the north star as long as you are in the northern hemisphere .. If you were in the north pole the north star would be directly above you, but as I'm in the UK, the north star is nearer the horizon

[ChadH]

Aaah - makes sense! Makes an interesting photo too.

Thanks for the explanation.

[g0isw]

Karen,

I bounce radio signals off meteors as a hobby!

It is called Meteor Scatter and I also watch for meteors all year, when not trying to open this Isis that is

More info on meteors:

http://www.qsl.net/g0isw/g0iswms.htm

[ChadH]

Interesting read - I always kind of took meteor's for granted without giving them a great deal of thought.

Whilst on this subject, I'm thinking of getting a telescope for my son's birthday. He'll only be five, so I don't want to buy something too extravagant, but I also want to make sure I get something worth using.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Cheers,

Chad

[Karen_G]

Hi g0isw,

Meteor Scattering does sound like a fun hobby

So you bounce a radio signal off a meteor in the hope of reflecting the signal back down to earth, miles away from where it originated.. Am I understanding it correctly?

So in order for you to know how far you have sent the signal, someone needs to receive your signal and respond to it? But how do they respond? Are they able to send a signal back to you by bouncing it off the same meteor? I was just thinking that as the meteor is a moving object, isn't it hard to send the signal back to the same place? Sorry if it's a daft question

Moreover, if you can bounce signals from one place to another repetitively, how long can you keep a single connection going between the two places?

Is this also what Ellie (Jodie foster) was doing with her father in the film Contact?

Thank you

Karen
-----------------------

Hi ChadH,

A telescope would make a great present for your son's birthday I loved the one I got from my parents when I was 10 I think? Unfortunately I'm not very good on telescopes so I can't advise you... you may get some good tips in the magazine "Astronomy Now" though. He's quite young, so just make sure he doesn't look directly at the Sun, unless he has a special sun filter (they are good fun to see solar flares )

Karen

[g0isw]

Chad,

I have a 9 year old son and a 6 year old daughter. I made the mistake of buying my son a x20 telescope too early.

I wish I had bought him a really nice pair of binoculars 7x50 and lightweight because he struggled to line up the telscope on anything smaller than the Moon and the telescope spent long periods not being used, whereas the binoculars he now has are used all the time for wildlife and on holidays etc. as well as looking at the night sky.

I would reconsider getting him a better telescope now he is 9.

All the best

Philip

[g0isw]

Karen,

Yes the film 'contact' was using Amateur Radio as was another film I cannot recall where Dennis Hopper's (a firefighter) son was talking to his dead Dad due to a huge solar flare.

Anyway Meteor Scatter radio contacts rely on multiple meteors to reflect small parts of your message over a period of time, usually around 20 minutes, but sometimes up to an hour.

The mostly metallic meteors burn up in the atmosphere and leave an ionised trail of particles, which VHF radio signals can bounce off for anything from 100milliseconds to over 2 minutes.

The usually time is often well under half a second!

You haven't time to speak, so you use an audio tone to represent each letter of the alphabet and play this through your radio using a computer soundcard. You speed up the tone so that your sentence instead of lasting perhaps 20 seconds, is transmitted in under 0.5 seconds repeatedly.

Imagine a spy radio burst transmitter sending a secret Morse Code message very, very quickly to avoid detection and direction finding by the enemy!

The receiving station listens and when a meteor is in just the right place he/she will hear my signal and then they slow it down to read it using their computer soundcard and WSJT software.

We take it in turns to transmit and receive every 30 seconds and over 20 minutes the entire message is transferred in both directions to complete the contact. In this time maybe 4-6 meteors.

Over the last couple of nights I succeeded in bouncing my signals of the Perseids Meteors to Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, & Germany.

Hope this answer hasn't bored you too much.

Regards

G0ISW

http://www.qsl.net/g0isw