Leonids campaign 1999 of ESA/SSD
Overview over our campaign
We observed the Leonids from Southern Spain, both from the Sierra Nevada
Observatory (OSN)
as well as from the Calar
Alto Observatory. We used image-intesified video cameras, a fish-eye
camera, a CCD still camera with wide-angle lens, and the 1.5-m-telescope
of OSN with a spectrograph.
Our main science goals were:
-
Participate in the determination of number rates vs. magnitude over a large
magnitude range (this we did)
-
Study the physical properties of individual meteors by measuring their
light curves and velocity profiles and compare these to other streams (we
are still working on this, but have the data)
-
Perform spectroscopy of persistent trains (while we were ready to do this
in the maximum night, the only long-lasting persistent train was seen the
night after the maximum :-(
In addition, we performed flux measurements and transmitted them in near-realtime
to European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. While the
automatic system did not quite meet our expectations, we transmitted
numbers from visual counts via GSM telephone.
The activity measurements were partially done Michael
Schmidhuber from the AVWM,
who flew for ESA on an american airplane dedicated to the study of meteors,
see
http://leonids.arc.nasa.gov.
Some results
We presented some of our results at the EGS conference in Nice, some at
the Leonid MAC workshop in Tel Aviv, both in April 2000. We wrote two publications
which have been submitted to Earth, Moon, and Planets. As soon as
these are accepted, we'll put them on the web.
Magnitude distributions
Here are the visually estimated magnitude distributions from about 15 Minutes
of video tape from our airplane-based video camera in the night of the
maximum. We do not see any reduction in the number of small meteors in
the linear plot. However, when plotting the meteor numbers in logarithmic
scale this statement is not so clear any more... I guess I have to look
at this in more detail after all.
The observing times are:
18 Nov 1999, 01h48m UT - 01h53m UT
18 Nov 1999, 02h13m UT - 02h18m UT
18 Nov 1999, 03h30m UT - 03h35m UT
Links
-
Presentation about or plans, given at the Meteorendag 99 on 13 Feb 1999:
click
here.
-
Powerpoint presentation of the current camera setups (263k): click here.
To "Meteor
observations at ESA/SSD"
This page prepared by Detlef
Koschny on 15 Feb 1999, last update 03 Jul 2000.
