Perseids 2003 - the gallery

Petra Rendtel, Jörg Strunk and I met at Oerlinghausen near Bielefeld, Germany for this year's Perseids. We wanted to assess the efficiency of various lenses used with the  Mintron  EX Camera. So we equipped our 4 cameras with a number of C-mount lenses  and pointed them to the same field in the sky. While the analysis of our counts is still in progress  first results indicate that we understand the effect of various parameters on the Mintron's efficiency as a meteor recorder on a semi-quantitative basis.

The sky was quite poor, Cirrus field moved through, and the full moon was annoying. The Mintrons detected much more meteors than we could see visually, obviously due to their high infrared sensitivity. 

This project produced a number of pretty pictures and videos as well. Some of the nicer meteors are shown here. These are sum images prepared with a meteor detection software written by Marc Vornhusen. Each one covers 2 minutes of operation. 

Fireball, 12/13.08.2003, 20:50:34 UT. 6mm f/0.8 lens	Fireball, 12/13.08.2003, 20:59:20 UT. 6mm f/0.8 lens

Video of both events