[meteorite-list] A meteor shower burst

From: bernd.pauli at paulinet.de <bernd.pauli_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: 11 Sep 2010 10:20:08 UT
Message-ID: <DIIE.0000009A0000501B_at_paulinet.de>

Hello Steve and List,

The only meteor sightings I could find in my Sky & Telescope back issues
for September do not fit the information you have provided...unfortunately.

Here is what I found in the September 1981 issue, p. 236:

New meteor shower. Last year, P. MacKinnon and R.A. Keen of Boulder,
Colorado, announced a possible new meteor shower from the direction of
southern Lyra or Cygnus. Despite fairly poor sky conditions, on September
16th, 17th, and 18th G. Kiladis had noticed that about 15 or 20 meteors per
hour seemed to be aligned with a radiant near right ascension 19.0h, declin-
ation +25?.

A good number of them were of magnitude 2 or brighter. A few weeks later,
MacKinnon and Keen themselves noted a similar hourly rate for a radiant at
about declination +32?, near right ascension 20.3h (October 1st) and 21.2h
(October 5th and 6th).

Because a meteor shower radiant is a perspective effect, it is usual for the direction
to shift eastward during the several weeks it takes the Earth to pass through a meteor
stream. Therefore, it is possible that these observers witnessed a hitherto undetected
meteor stream.

Opposing this view, however, are P. Roggemans and several other Belgian
observers, who did not find any meteors associated with a radiant in this
part of the sky for the same range of dates.

These conflicting reports appeared late in 1980, in IAU Circulars 3528, 3542, and 3545.

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Cheers,

Bernd
Received on Sat 11 Sep 2010 06:20:08 AM PDT