Some experiments with a video double station setup during the 2006 Perseids

During the 2006 perseids I visited Petra and Jörg Strunk in their new house at Herford. Together we did some experiments with a double station setup. Jörg operates a Mintron camera with a 6mm f/0.8 lens at Leopoldshöhe pointing to the zenith, some 13 km away. During the Perseid maximum nights we operated  my own Mintron camera with a 6mm f/1.2 lens, also showing to the zenith at Herford. Of course this short basleline was a clear shortcoming of our effort.

Another problem was that we used two different popular meteor detection programs: While at Leopoldhöhe Jörg used Metrec, we installed UFO capture on Petra's computer that runs on Windows XP and has a Metrec-incompatible hardware.

UFO capture, on the other hand, is very useful for double station work because it comes complete with a program for double station analysis and orbit determination, UFO orbit.

In order to bridge the gap between the UFO capture and the Metrec world I wrote me a little tool which allows to browse the data and to load data from the UFO and/or  Metrec outputs and converts them to UFO capture input files (R90 format). This tool can be downloaded here and used as freeware.

Here are some results which clearly show the possibilities but still suffer from the small baseline and the inaccuracies of velocity determination. The first factor could easily elimninated by using a larger baseline. This work is currently in progress.

This is a -5 mag meteor we detected with both cameas at 1:20:24 UT. Clearly the same meteor was recorded.  Note the Cassiopeia constellation in order to get some idea of the parallax seen.     Herford (UFO capture)             Leopoldshöhe (Metrec)

My double station browser software displays both meteor and loads the related datasets from the Metrec and UFO-capture output. After that it stores the data pairwise in an UFO orbit R90 file:

The data are then imported to UFO orbit, which does the double station analysis and orbit determination:
The analysis window clearly shows that meteors on a starmap and the position of the radiant in relation to the published Perseid radiant (circle).

UFO orbit also computes ground tracks of the meteor. The fact that the track is displayed twice shows the limited accuracy due to the short baseline.

The orbit determination reveals a reasonable 107P/ Swift-Tuttle-style orbit. UFO orbit allows to plot beautyful depictions of the solar system and the computed orbit of the meteoroid:

Meteoroid orbit                                       node= 140 Peri=139.6 i= 108.2 q = 0.9 aU e= 0.88 Comet 107P orbit node= 139.41 peri= 152.51 i= 113.44 q = 0.959 aU e= 0.963

Another meteor was detected at 2:40 UT. Results of a similar analysis are shown:

We hope that this experiment may be of use to make double station work with Metrec and UFO meteors more popular.

Hartwig Lüthen

Impressum