BRAMS Newsfeed
The Perseids are back and we need your help for the Radio Meteor Zoo
The Perseids are already coming back! The maximum of activity of the meteor shower is planned for 12-13 of August. The full Moon is on 7 August so conditions will not be optimal for visual observations. In this case radio observations are even more important. This year we would like to be able to produce an activity curve for one station by August 15. This is very challenging and for that we will need the help of many of you! One day of data consists of approximately 300 images. Each of them needs to be analyzed by 10 different users. We will provide images from 11 to 13 of August, one day at a time. So to obtain an activity curve on August 15, we will need about 9000 classifications in 3 days. If e.g. 1000 users are participating, that will be 9 classifications per user on average, or 3 images classified per day. Of course the more users the better! Data will be released on 12, 13 and 14 of August as we need to collect and prepare them for upload to the RMZ website. Meanwhile you can also help us by analyzing data from the same station obtained on 22 and 23 of July, during days when the Perseids were not active at all. If these data are fully processed before the meteor shower, we will then be able to also subtract the background from the total activity. That is the ultimate goal for August 15. We hope to "see" as many of you as possible on August 12-14 and that between two classifications, you might also be able to spot a few shooting stars at your location. Get involved again at the Radio Meteor Zoo Thank you in advance!
Internal seminar on the Radio Meteor Zoo
Last Friday, Hervé Lamy gave an internal seminar about the Radio Meteor Zoo. The presentation included the reasons why we started a Citizen Science project, how we collaborated with Zooniverse, how we deal with individual contributions from Zooniverse users and finally some preliminary results. The presentation is available here.
BRAMS annual meeting at Euro Space Center in Redu on 15/10/2016
On 15/10/2016, we had our BRAMS annual meeting at the Euro Space Center in Redu. Thank you to all the participants and to Dominique Gering and the people at the ESC who welcomed us for the first time. You can find links to the presentations below :
- Automatic detection of meteor echoes in BRAMS data : status - H. Lamy & P. Ernotte
- Retrieving meteoroids trajectories using BRAMS data : preliminary simulations - H. Lamy & C. Tétard
- The Radio Meteor Zoo - a citizen science project - H. Lamy & S. Calders
- The interferometer in Humain - H. Lamy & C. Tétard
- Forward Scattering : calcul de la vitesse d'un météoroïde qui génère un head Echo - P. Ernotte
- Update of the FRIPON project and the determination of meteor trajectory - F. Colas
- Correlating BRAMS radio and FRIPON video data - J-L Rault
Manual counts during Perseids 2015
Using our online tool developed to draw rectangles around potential meteor echoes in spectrograms, manual counts between 18:00 UT on 12/08 and 14:00 on 13/08 were obtained. The figure below shows an example of a spectrogram where red rectangles have been manually drawn around meteor echoes. The 3 graphs below show successively : The raw counts (obtained for each spectrogram every 5 minutes) including all meteor echoes (long and short). The peaks of the Perseids are nearly impossible to spot as the total number is a mix between Perseids and sporadics. The red curve is a moving average on 11 points (so more or less 1 hour) and shows some peaks but not very clearly. Hourly raw counts including all meteor echoes (long and short), simply obtained from the first curve by adding individual counts for all spectrograms in one hour. The peaks of the Perseids become visible but again not very clear. Hourly counts including only long meteor echoes. The definition of long is rather vague but includes basically all meteor echoes that have an horizontal extent in the spectrograms, indicating a long duration than typical short (underdense) meteor echoes that represent the bulk of the sporadic background. Then, in this plot, two peaks at ~ 5 UT and ~ 8 UT become visible. These are in agreement with meteor counts obtained by Felix Verbelen using the Ypres beacon at 49.99 MHz. It would be nice to compare these observations with visual observations (see e.g. this page at IMO).
Beacon switched off on 17/08/2015
Due to additional tests with the UAV equipped with a transmitter, the BRAMS beacon was temporarily switched off on 17/08 between 10:04 UT and 14:58 UT.
Perseids 2015 at ROB
On the night of 12 August 2015, the Planetarium and the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) were organizing night-sky observations on the plateau of Uccle during the Perseids 2015. About 500 people visited the site between 10 PM and 1 AM. We ran a BRAMS demo as well which was very successful.
Beacon off on 07/08/2015
Due to lightnings near Dourbes, the beacon was temporarily off betwen 17h53 and 18h27 UT on 07/08/2015.