September 2017 Meteors

Still playing catch-up. Rather than go night-by-night, here is a summary of September’s SALSA3 meteor detections.

• Meteors detected on 28 of 30 nights in September
• 246.97 hours of sky time
• Best night was Sept 25 UT with 25 meteors
• Average number of meteors per night = 15.3
• 429 meteors detected
• 302 sporadics
• best shower was the Orionids with 33 meteors
• second best shower was the little know September Lyncids with 12 meteors

September is an interesting month in that it sees high meteor rates no single shower is very active. The Orionids are still a month away from their mid to late October peak. While they will be a major producer for a few days in October, during September they produced ~1 video meteor per night. The second best shower were the September Lyncids which were active for most of the last 2/3rds of September. The 12 video meteors corresponds to only ~0.5 meteors per night.

A total of 429 meteors is low for my system during the month of September. Usually the number is closer to 550. In the next update (containing my early October results), I’ll explain some of the problems I’ve been running into with my camera system and how I’m (slowly) trying to address them.

Obs Date(UT)     Time    TOT SPO ANT SLY STA NTA ORI Oth
SAL 2017-09     00h 00m  429 302  31  12  8   3   33  40 

SAL - SALSA3 camera in Tucson (Carl Hergenrother)
VIS - Visual observations from Tucson (Carl Hergenrother)
Time - Total amount of time each camera looked for meteors 
TOT - Total number of meteors detected
SPO - Sporadics (meteors not affiliated with any particular meteor shower)
ANT - Antihelions
SLY - September Lyncids
NTA - Northern Taurids
STA - Southern Taurids
ORI - Orionids
Oth - other minor showers