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Carpal Tunnel
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I have a question to ask:
Did anybody other than myself notice that the fireballs did not move in a consistent direction?
I am beginning to doubt my sanity. I've been reading everything I can put my hands on about the Leonid showers, and the reading would indicate that the movement is consistently in one direction, which is logical.
But that is not what I observed last week.
If anyone carefully noticed the direction of the the various appearances, and also noticed that they moved in various directions, please post here.
Best regards,
DubDoubting her sanity
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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do you mean that the fireballs themselves changed direction as they fell, or that they came from several areas of the sky? (but flying straight)
formerly known as etaoin...
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I observed some that fell directly into our western field area--skywise.
The moon was...maybe north or northwest. I didn't notice any that fell over in the area of the moon.
Many seemed to moved west.
But I could have sworn I saw several move eastward. No joke.
I keep running that mental tape of the morning I watched. I looked all over the sky, trying to catch them because their appearances were so very, very brief.
What I thought I was seeing was an appearance of a seam opening in the sky--beyond or behind the stars, so it seemed--a seam ripping open quickly then disappearing--and that seam seemed to open from east to west often, but also from south to east or even west to east.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I am pretty ignorant about astronomy, but since the Earth is passing through a fairly
wide spread cloud of the particles, could not Earth's gravitation change aangle of entry of
metiorites enough to be noticeable?
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Carpal Tunnel
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I have always understood that they can move in most any direction once they enter the atmosphere. the earth is basically flying through a band of comet flotsam and jetsam, and the small particles can be influenced by atmospheric conditions. I don't think you were seeing things!  the last good shower I saw was in the late seventies, and they were flying all around. I wonder whatever happened to Kathy...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The principle is that while they may seem to move in any direction from the point of view of the observer, they radiate from a common point of origin.
If you had a piece of graph paper and an accurate plot of their various trajectories, and you extended the lines backwards, you would find a point of convergence [edit: divergence, actually]. In this case - somewhere the constellation Leo, which is the reason they are called Leonids.
(One of my early Astronomy One lab assignments was to do exactly that, though I think it may have been the Perseids [August], not the Leonids.) I'm starting to sound like you, Bill! :-)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear wofahulicodoc: It seems to me that there would be three factors involved:
1.the trajectory of the particles themselves,
2.the motion of the earth along its orbit
3.the rotation of the earth
It must be a bit like an automobile driving through a cloud of insects.
Of these I would expect Earth's motion along its orbit to the the greatest.
I wonder if Earth's gravitation pull has enough time to have much effect
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Carpal Tunnel
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More than three, I'm sure, and it isn't really a "point" of origin either but rather a "region" of sky. Nevertheless the con/divergence is noted consistently, because the speed of the meteors dwarfs the other influences.
Think about the absence of Doppler effect on radio signals in a moving car. Even though the speed is not 186,000 miles per second but 186,000 miles-plus-88-feet per second (driving toward the transmitter at 60 mph), it really doesn't show up anywhere.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I wonder how the "beam" of meteorite particles stays so relatively constant over such long
periods of time.
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Carpal Tunnel
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the particles are detritus of comets which have followed an orbit for thousands if not millions of years. those orbits remain fairly constant, so the buildup of particles and the regular shedding of new material continues. pretty cool...
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