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Listening to Leonids

Posted by michael on from the ground-control-to-major-tom dept.

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."

4 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. frizzy hair? by Nate+Fox · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  2. ELF/VLF listening by yack0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is reminscent of some stuff I initially heard about on an NPR episode of 'Lost and Found Sound' which was a feature they were running in the last year or so.

    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.
  3. Amazing that they posted it by Chairboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. I Listened to the Leonids by Sigfried_Blip · · Score: 5, Informative

    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