Daily Image

13-08-2019
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Listening to meteors

Submitter: Cees Bassa
Description: Last night was the maximum of the Perseids meteor shower. Due to the cloudy weather, not many were visible. Fortunately, they could, and can, still be heard. Near the Dwingeloo telescope, a small yagi antenna is listening to the French GRAVES radar near Dijon. This space surveillance radar also illuminates meteors, and their reflections are picked up by the yagi antenna.

You can listen to the meteors live via the CAMRAS WebSDR. Besides the noise, you'll hear a fuzzy tone, which is the radar signal being reflected by the ionosphere. On top of that, there will be short pops, pings or whistling sounds. These are meteors, most likely Perseids, ionizing the atmosphere, allowing radio waves from the radar to be reflected.

The figure shows a spectrogram of the radio signals received over 20 minutes this morning. All the vertical stripes are meteor reflections, with the brightest ones showing persistent reflections for a few seconds. The diagonal lines are airplanes.
Copyright: Cees Bassa, CAMRAS
 
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