Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series
Detecting Persistent Trains from Meteors in Widefield Images
Presented by Logan Cordonnier (UNM)
This work develops a pipeline for identifying optical persistent trains (PTs) from meteors in images taken by the Widefield Persistent Train (WiPT) camera. PTs are long-lasting optical emissions which are occasionally observed following a meteor streak. Using the correlations between consecutive image frames can determine whether there are lingering structures indicative of PTs, however other phenomenon such as clouds and contrails also exhibit similar structures to PTs, so additional filtering is required. Applying this pipeline to the first campaign of the WiPT yielded 22 meteors with PTs, 8 of which were concurrently recorded by the Global Meteor Network (GMN), a database which contains parameters of observed meteors. The current observing campaign which uses an improved camera has to date found 15 meteors with PTs. The next step is to use the parameters found in the GMN to statistically analyze PTs to determine which meteors produce them and how they relate to the meteors which produce meteor radio afterglows (MRAs).
2:00 pm, Thursday, December 2, 2021
PAIS-3205, PAIS
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