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Listening to Leonids
Bill Kendrick writes: "An interesting article was posted by NASA about reports of people hearing Leonids as they burnt up in the atmosphere. And not 5 minutes later, like you'd expect, but instantly. Apparently this is thanks to very low frequency radio signals given off by the meteors as they burn."
...or Extremely Low Frequency for those that have never heard the term before.
:) I'm not sure if it's still in use today. Usually the government only shows you out-of-service tech on cable networks.
The nava used this to communicate with submarines on the other side of the earth by directing ELF signals directly through the earth's core. Saw it on Discovery once.
Simple materials like aluminum foil, thin wires, pine needles -- even dry or frizzy hair -- can intercept and respond to a VLF field.
I bet Weird Al was having the multimedia show of a lifetime!
Years ago when I was a kid I remember watching the Leonids. While watching them I distinctly remember hearing some of the larger ones doing this exact buzzing. I always figured it was just a bad memory or something. Nice to know I'm not crazy. :)
It did sound like a fizzing sound... Not very loud, but you would definately hear it.
Here are a couple of good links on ELF.
r p/ elf.html
http://server5550.itd.nrl.navy.mil/projects/haa
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/elf.htm
Looks like some pretty nifty, and quite dangerous technology.
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
One /. reader at Nasa close with his computer close to the antennas saw this earlier post and tried out the program.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I remember reading about the same type of thing occuring during very intense northern lights. Same sort of thing, where the event and sound occured at the same time, and there couldn't possibly be time for the sound to travel the distance.
IRC, it was the same sort of thing, an ELF interaction directly in the brain.
So my thought is, could we use this for actual communication? Cause voices in someones head?
they talk about things like auroras, meteors, and nuclear blasts setting off these vlf radio signals... so maybe someone out there with more knowledge of the science of the energy levels required to set off these vlf radio frequencies will smack me down on this... but how friggin' cool would this be for gaming?
;-P
can you imagine playing a fps and getting hit by something that sets off objects in your room crackling and vibrating? maybe a tie-in is possible with this article
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hear this sort of thing really pisses off whales.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
This fucking insightful post was brought to you by the letter F, and fucking Tourette's Syndrome.
Love,
Anonymous Fucking Coward
Stephen McGreevy, a professor at some college, IIRC, in California has been listening to Aurora Borealis' for years and has actually made recordings of some of the things he's heard and made CD's for retail sale. He also sells receivers to people so they can listen to the earth as well.
Related links:
His home page for VLF radio
The page he wants people to bookmark , cause his current provider bites.
His second CD
The VLF receiver page
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
hahahaha, I kill me.
Let's all have a turn.
I'm amazed that they posted it. It seems as if most government agencies (NASA included) are using the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to pull information offline.
Please note that NASA has become increasingly unwilling to divulge information about what happens on the space station. Routine information such as the 'ships log' and audio feeds are no longer shared or available.
I apologize for this off-topic message, but more people should understand that this article, while fascinating, is nothing compared to the reams of important data that is being maliciously sequestered by an organization paid for with tax dollars. For every piece on meteor sounds, there are 10 pages of technical data on spaceflight, human research, and more that is being systematically hidden.
I predict that the information will become available through some type of Lexis-Nexus style pay system in the future so that you can have the privilege of paying for the data twice.
Bread and circuses, my friend. Look at the rest of the story, and make NASA give us what we own.
So, all I need is a monitor and some pine needles and I have my own portable radio system! Woohoo! Think of all the applications!
Uhh.. wait a minute...
so...since the Vogons can now have their freaky communications device, and we *already* have babelfish what are we waiting for next?
I guess I'll hold out for the frictionless car.
How is it once in a lifetime?
The Leonid meteor occurs every 33 years, and take place over several years.
Europe, for instance, is supposed to have the best view next year.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
To see the article, you'll need to get a trailist account with their archive. Once you have it, go here, or search for "Sizzling Skies" in the 06 Jan 01 issue.
Does anyone have information as to what exactly a Leonid is?
Sorry for the ignorance...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I'm printing about 50 copies of this and passing it around at work tomorrow. You see folks, I and my wife heard several of these during the Leonid showers and became a laughingstock when we told the astro-geeks at work. The only meteors that make noise, they claimed, were ferrous stones that penetrated to the lower atmosphere. Since the Leonids contained no meteors of this type, they thought I was just being stupid or lying to impress people.
Those of you who didn't hear this need to understand that it is a very quiet effect. I was watching the show up in the Sierra Nevada mountains south of a little town called Buck Meadows...about 20 minutes from Yosemite National Park. I was like 50 miles from the nearest city (with several mountains in between), 20 miles from the nearest highway, and MILES from ANYTHING louder than a squirrel. Heck, I could hear the hum of the high tension power lines over a mile and a half away and compared "fireball ratings" with a couple other skywatchers more than a thousand feet up the mountain...and didn't even have to raise my voice. It was that quuiieett, and we still barely heard this effect.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Now this isn't as cool as hearing meteors unaided with my ears. But while I was outside watching the Leonids here in Cupertino, I was also watching and listening to NASA's Meteor-radar with a linux program called baudline. There was a lot of activity that night, about a hit a second. Unfortunately I can't correlate the radar hits with the visuals since I live in California and the meteor radar is in other states (NM TX and AL). Still it was cool.
Right now the meteor radar is getting a hit about every 20 seconds. Sweet, I just saw a 70 second streak with a doppler shift of about 183 Hz. That is screaming at about 17X earth rotation! (If I wasn't so lazy I'd calculate that in MPH or m/s)
How did I do it? I just piped the real-time NASA stream into the standard input (stdin) of baudline, then equalized it with about 10 seconds of quietness, and then watched and listened away. I used this command line:
mpg123 -s http://icecast.msfc.nasa.gov:8000/forward-scat | baudline -stdin -channels 1 -overlap 100 -fftsize 2048 -mem 9 -record -samplerate 22050 -session meteor_radar
If the geocities site for baudline craps out, try again later, or try the mirror site. The downloaded md5sum for baudline_0.87_i686.tar.gz should be 72f949826ac81a461a8b4b5c5551f366
I guess I'll hold out for the frictionless car.
That might run very smoothly however, braking and steering might be a little difficult though...
One thing several of my friends and I wondered about is why the meteors didn't all travel in the same direction? The velocity of the Earth during the shower was basically constant. The velocity of all the particles in the cloud of debris that make up the shower should be the same, otherwise the cloud would have dispersed generations ago. If the two velocities are the same, then the path of the meteors should have all been the same. But while most of the meteors clearly traveled from East to West in accordance with the rotation of the Earth, quite a few appeared to come from the North and South! Does anyone know what causes this?
I can't say one way or another whether this is true.
The way that Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab, got his start is that he designed some impressively loud speakers while an undergrad at CalTech, and then blasted Ride of the Valkyrie over Pasadena's neighboring very upscale town of San Marino at 7 a.m. one morning during finals week (playing The Ride during finals is a tradition there). He went on to start a stereo store that sold high-quality speakers of his own manufacture that had the name Gross National Products. He got into the computer biz by making some manner of those little cards that plugged into the SparcSystem 1.
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying maybe you should look into how GNP speakers were made.
I always wanted a set of his bookshelf speakers.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The kitchen stove in the house I lived in in Moscow, Idaho when I was 12 would pick up a local radio station. It sounded very quiet, but if the room was still you could make out the words in the announcer's voice.
Curiously, it only started doing that the last couple months we lived there, and it was only that one station that was received, although there were several in the area.
Later on, I lived around the corner from a CB fanatic that had a quite illegal overpowered station in his home. He had a fifty foot antenna set up in his backyard. If he broadcast while we were listening to the stereo, it would blast the room with his racket.
I found that I could receive him clearly on a cheap 2 inch audio speaker that had one foot of wire soldered to each terminal and stretched out in opposite directions. That's it.
A neighbor took up a petition to ask the FCC to bust him but they never would.
I mentioned both of these phenomena to an electrical engineer once and he thought it shouldn't happen because there was nothing to rectify the signal. I'm not so sure how it could work, maybe impurities or oxidation in the metal forming a natural diode, or nonlinear effects from all the power, or something I don't know.
Someone previously asked if you could receive radio on dental braces. Yes you can, I've never heard it happen but I've heard of it happening to other people.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
There are some relative links in the original, which in your post will appear to reside at slashdot, which will 404. The pages are:
Please read Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind.
Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.
I'll go make them absolute URL's in the original now.
Let me also mention my DeCSS mirror and my Free Dmitry! page.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I noticed that one post made mention of some ELF towers in Annapolis. Since I live in Annapolis, and had never heard of this, I got rather curious. After a quick Google search, I came up with a few interesting things:
So it looks like the Navy did, in fact, have a rather groundbreaking ELF setup back in the day. Unfortunately those antennae seem to be gone now, but hey, technology marches on. Now that I'm reading some of these articles I know exactly which antennae they're talking about, and I do remember noticing that there seemed to suddenly be fewer of them a couple years ago...
A frictionless car would have problems accelerating too.
Or maybe Bruce the Cowboy, to go along with Larry and Jerry.
Google Search.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
It's good to see that Dr Keay's research has been gained respectability.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle when he was working on this, and attended a talk he gave on the subject. Perhaps I got it wrong, but I gained the impression that some of his colleagues thought he was wasting his time researching this rather controversial topic.
Respectability is important in the hard sciences, and this must have seemed to some to be more like paranormal psychology than physics. Good on him for sticking to his guns.
You can read more about Geophysical Electrophonics at Colin Keay's home page.
jmp
According to this old ABCNews article, communications systems that work by bouncing radio signals off momentary streaks of ionized air created by meteorites have been in use for decades. I remember reading about a truck tracking system based on this. Kind of cool actually.
They work on the principle that if you send out a weak, omnidirectional radio signal it will randomly be reflected to the right target every so often by a streak of ionized air from one of the 80,000 or so meteorites that hit the atmosphere every second. If the target radio sends out a return signal quickly enough, it will be reflected back along the same path to the sender. The ionized streak of air lasts about a second, which is long enough to shake hands and send a little data back and forth, like a truck's position or an updated delivery schedule. Radio signals can be reflected several thousand miles this way.
I watching a meteor shower in October 1981, maybe the Perseids, and 8 seconds after each one we heard a distinct 'pop' as of a distant gunshot. My father (a physics teacher) wrote to Patrick Moore, who hosts the BBC's The Sky at Night programme, and he replied saying that this was impossible. Maybe we were hearing a reflection of this fizzing sound, but it doesn't seem loud enough to carry over 3 kilometers.
In addition to what has already been posted, not every meteor you saw was neccessarily a Leonid. You can see one or two meteors an hour on any night. If it's dark enough.
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Now you can shut up anyone watching a sci-fi movie who complains that sound doesn't travel through outer space. Clearly the TIE fighters are just emitting ELFs, and probably intentionally too...
ALF could probably hear ELFs and VLFs with all that fur.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Uh, assuming a 7 or 8 bit encoding of characters, 1bps, shouldn't it take 7 or 8 second per character, not 5 minutes?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.