2/20/2023 0 Comments Meteoroid pictureAfter applying corrections for the meteor’s moment, causing the light to be spread out over more pixels in a frame compared to the stationary stars, we can determine the meteor limiting magnitude.Įxample image from one of our meteor cameras. This approach allows us to measure the signal from 100’s of stars with known magnitude and color at any time throughout the night. A better approach consists of using the stars in the field of view of the camera as a proxy to determine the meteor limiting magnitude. Measuring the meteor limiting magnitude using the meteors themselves is a difficult problem since the sky conditions and radiant position will change before enough meteors have been detected to get a good statistical measurement of the limiting magnitude. A small magnitude uncertainty in limiting magnitude can translate to a significant uncertainty in the limiting mass. Since the limiting meteor magnitude ultimately is used to calculate the limiting meteor mass, it is important to understand these factors and to monitor how they change throughout the night. These factors will change over the course of the night, as the meteor radiant moves across the sky and as the sky conditions change. This value depends on the camera hardware and software, sky conditions, and the angular speed of the meteors. The meteor limiting magnitude is the apparent magnitude at which all meteors brighter than are detected. These methods are currently applied to NASA’s wide-field meteor camera network to determine nightly fluxes, but are applicable to other camera networks. Our method for determining the stellar limiting magnitude and how we transform it into the meteor limiting magnitude is presented. We use the stellar limiting magnitude as a proxy of the meteor limiting magnitude. Sky conditions can change on fairly short timescales therefore one must monitor the meteor limiting magnitude at regular intervals throughout the night, rather than just measuring it once. The mass distribution of meteoroids is thought to follow a power law, thus being slightly off in the limiting magnitude can have a significant effect on the measured flux. ![]() Since meteor brightness is linked to meteor mass, the limiting magnitude is needed to calculate the limiting mass of the meteor flux measurement. An accurate measurement of the limiting magnitude is important in order to calculate the meteoroid flux from a meteor shower or sporadic source. The limiting meteor magnitude defines the faintest magnitude at which all meteors are still detected by a given system. We present our method to calculate the meteor limiting magnitude.
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