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Session 33 - Amateurs & Professionals: Collaborators in the New Age of Electronic Astronomy - II.
Oral session, Tuesday, June 10
North Main Hall C/D,
Bright (up to 7th magnitude) radiometeors are being reliably counted at two separate sites (Poplar Springs, FL and Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD) using computer-automated, passive forward scatter systems. Although radiometeor systems are not subject to the usual visual meteorological disturbances they are subject to other influences including sporadic-E, troposheric scattering, diurnal mesospheric changes, and radiant shadowing by the earth due to rotation. By sampling the data at a non-traditional, but power of two optimal, bin size of 0.75 hour, we have been able to derive sporadic flux means and standard deviations ( 30 accuracy with backscatter radar results. Our results indicate that the radiometeor flux does not follow the usually assumed Poisson distribution. Using wavelet analysis, we have also been able to more readily detect previously known, weak meteor showers within the sporadic background better than can be done with standard background subtraction techniques. Part of this work was carried out under grants by the American Meteor Society Ltd (to Richardson) and under NASA Contract NAS5-31760 (Mallama).
