With this post, I have caught up with my SALSA3 meteor data. The plot nicely shows the increase not just in total meteors per night but also the Taurids (the Northern and Souther Taurids are combined in the plot) and Orionids.
Note the big jump in rates starting on the night of October 8. The increase is not actually real. After noticing how low rates seemed during September I took my camera system apart and discovered that at some point this summer, the glass in the camera enclosure separated from the housing. As a result rain must have collected on the camera lens. After replacing the housing and cleaning the lens, the number of detections doubled!
The big shower of October is the Orionids. This year’s will be observable under Moon-less skies. Bob Lunsford of the American Meteor Society has an excellent guide to observing these old pieces of our Solar System’s most famous comet, Comet 1P/Halley.
Obs Date(UT) Time TOT SPO EGE STA NTA ORI Oth SAL 2017-10-17 10h 48m 53 25 3 7 4 12 2 SAL 2017-10-16 11h 25m 45 25 2 8 3 7 0 SAL 2017-10-15 10h 22m 50 33 1 6 1 8 1 SAL 2017-10-14 00h 00m SAL 2017-10-13 05h 16m 43 27 1 4 4 4 3 SAL 2017-10-12 02h 39m 16 10 0 1 3 0 2 SAL 2017-10-11 10h 37m 50 37 3 5 3 2 0 SAL 2017-10-10 11h 05m 45 30 4 5 2 2 2 SAL 2017-10-09 10h 56m 42 36 1 3 0 1 1 SAL 2017-10-08 08h 02m 34 18 0 4 4 4 4 SAL 2017-10-07 10h 43m 18 11 0 1 1 2 3 SAL 2017-10-06 10h 01m 20 16 1 1 1 1 0 SAL 2017-10-05 01h 50m 3 1 0 1 0 1 0 SAL 2017-10-04 10h 39m 20 12 0 1 3 3 1 SAL 2017-10-03 10h 32m 16 13 0 0 0 1 2 SAL 2017-10-02 10h 42m 24 18 1 2 1 0 2 SAL 2017-10-01 10h 34m 24 13 2 2 0 2 5 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