Perseid meteor shower peaks Friday

[bananas]

http://page2rss.com/beed322f53739487405c4c715fae23c7/5582298_5582561/updated-today-at-ut-

PERSEID METEOR SHOWER: Earth is entering a stream of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. International observers are now reporting more than a dozen Perseids per hour, a number that will increase as the shower reaches its peak on August 12-13. Full moonlight will reduce visibility on peak night, but not enough to completely spoil the show--especially when the ISS is scheduled to make an appearance among the meteors. Get the full story from Science@NASA. Bonus links:live meteor radarISS tracker

[sakabatou]

1. Too much light pollution to see it here

:(

[Poll_Blind]

2. +1 Listening in now.

I love this kind of thing. OnEdit: Nice, just heard my first meteor go over the sensor.

:thumbsup:

PB

[pokerfan]

3. stupid moon

We tried to blow it up in 2009 but it didn't work.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/06/nasa-lcross-mission-to-bo_n_311038.html

[Fumesucker]

4. Meteors are detectable by radio..

To make a long story short, you tune to a frequency in or above the FM band and not used close to you but that has a powerful transmitter or transmitters over your horizon, stations you wouldn't normally be able to pick up.

When a meteor ionizes the atmosphere those radio waves will bounce off the ionization trail until it dissipates, this reflection will come through as a brief snatch of whatever programming is on the particular channel you happen to catch the reflection of.

It's kind of like a poor man's radar where someone else pays for and operates the transmitter.

http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatter.html

There's a link to listen to actual live radio meteors here, it's a bit boring most of the time.

http://www.roswellastronomyclub.com/radio_meteors.htm

If you use a waterfall display to turn the sounds to images you can evaluate the data visually, I've used and like the freeware Spectrum Lab for this..

http://www.qsl.net/dl4yhf/spectra1.html

With a sufficiently high res display you can get an entire night's worth of meteor observations in a single automatic jpeg screen shot.

It occurs to me that in this age of the internet a system of computers running something like WinRadio would make world wide real time meteor detection network possible for peanuts compared to some other "big science" projects.The more nodes you have in the system the better the resolution would be for individual meteors.

http://www.winradio.com/

[Psephos]

5. Great post, thanks. :) n/t

[krispos42]

6. Really? That's awesome!

Does it work in daylight?

It has to... right?

[Fumesucker]

7. Yes, the radio system doesn't even notice whether it's day or night.

At one of the links they talk about daylight meteor showers that were never known until the advent of radar and offshoots.

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. I tried to go out and watch the last one, but got scared when the coyotes sounded way too close.

*bummed*