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Re: Scintillation and flaring
I observed the last two mornings, paying more attention to the scintillation
of field stars as a result of the discussion here. The first night I had
fairly steady seeing, but the second the seeing was extremely poor.
During these two observations, I noticed two things:
First, scintillation occured all over my FOV, but did not create any
problems at all. In fact, only those instances occuring near the edge of my
FOV even "registered" to me. These I was able to immediately recognize as a
non-meteor.
Second, there were situations that did cause me a little more trouble and
these are what I would call a bright star "flaring." On the above mornings,
examples of these stars were Vega, Arcturus and Spica. Sometimes when
looking throughout the FOV, and one of these stars were toward the edge,
they would show a dramatic increase in brightness, which was very
short-lived. In almost all cases, these caused me to instinctively move my
eyes in that direction to confirm if it was a meteor. But, telling the
difference between a star flaring and a true meteor was not difficult. (Note
I read somewhere, maybe WGN, where the eye can internally scatter light
which would probably be the cause of flaring. As Lew mentioned, we need an
eye doc here to explain this stuff better!)
So overall, I feel that the scintillation of stars have very little effect
on meteor observing.
Mark Davis
MeteorObs@charleston.net
Awendaw, South Carolina, USA
Assistant Recorder, ALPO Meteors Section
Coordinator, North American Meteor Network
Visit the NAMN home page at:
http://medicine.wustl.edu/~kronkg/namn.html