Megan's Blog

More Leonid echoes

The star party went well on Friday night. There were clear spells along with some cloud and even a bit of rain, but some people were lucky enough to see early Leonids streak across the sky. I spent most of the evening sat indoors with the radio receiver described in my last post, explaining to people what they were looking at (and hearing through the speakers). There was a steady stream of "pings" from meteors, but nothing too impressive.

Last night I reassembled the kit before I left to go home in order to try and catch the second peak at 0445 UT this morning. It was cloudy out of my window at 4am, then it started raining, so I didn't see anything visually, but the receiver saw plenty!

How impressive is that? Not bad for something put together in a hurry! Big thanks to all the helpful people in Dev Labs, especially Eddie who got very carried away with all this and actually built the antenna and associated bits and pieces. I also recorded the audio overnight which is the process of being compressed down to a manageable size (the raw data for the night was 500Mb of images and over 8Gb of audio). When it's done I'll may be post a couple of audio clips.