[meteorite-list] A Twisted Meteor Trail Over Tenerife: camera bump

From: Chris Peterson <clp_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 16:55:00 -0600
Message-ID: <368BEC835BB649EC9818979BE604AA92_at_bellatrix>

That analysis isn't accurate. The exposure time of the image was a minute,
but the meteor only lasted on the order of a second. Jiggle the camera for a
couple of seconds around the meteor event and you'll get just what we see:
the meteor shows a decaying sinusoidal sort of image, and everything else is
practically unaffected. A couple of seconds of vibration will have almost no
effect on the long exposure star images, and any recorded effect would be
nearly impossible to tease out of the much larger impact of star trailing
and lens aberration.

To produce a trail image of this brightness, the meteor had an apparent
magnitude of around zero, about the same as Arcturus, the bright star just
to its upper left. If the camera was jarred, that star is bright enough to
show something, and that something would be a slightly larger diameter, and
possibly some elongation. The star image is certainly large, and certainly
elongated. But how can you determine if that's from the camera moving or
from trailing and aberration?

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Elizabeth Warner" <warnerem at astro.umd.edu>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] A Twisted Meteor Trail Over Tenerife: camera
bump


> As someone who has taken lots of astrophotos, mostly using a tripod and
> having several hundred pictures ruined because of bumping the tripod or
> camera shake from the mirror flapping up, those squiggles are not from
> either of those.
>
> If the camera had shaken, the buildings and everything else would also
> exhibit that and they don't. The stars are slightly trailed (because he is
> not tracking on the stars!! That's why they appear as dashes) as well as
> having some coma (the orientation of which changes in different parts of
> the picture as that should).
>
> Camera shake will affect everything in the image and I'm just not seeing
> those signs that would scream "camera shake!"
>
>
> Clear Skies!
> Elizabeth
Received on Thu 03 Jun 2010 06:55:00 PM PDT