The Corkscrew Meteor

startleman writes "Over on Space.com is an interesting image of a corkscrew meteor. 'On Jan. 1, 1986, [Jimmy Westlake] was photographing [Halley's comet] through his homemade 8-inch reflecting telescope..."About one minute into the exposure, I watched a meteor zip through the field of the telescope." When he developed the roll of slide film, he was astounded that '...Crossing the tail of Halley's comet was a corkscrew meteor trail with no fewer than 25 twists in it.' Westlake's photo was never published until today. He wonders if there are others out there."

Comments

by the way...Comet Macholz

[helioquake]

Off topic but...Comet Macholz is found right by Pleiades ("seven" star cluster) tonight. I could manage to spot it with a pair of binocular in Boston. It's fairly fuzzy and faint, though.

Yes, indeed

[barakn]

The assumption of a 60 Hz hum and 25 twists implies a total visible travel time of .42 seconds, which seems about right. The fact that the trail isn't more smeared is an indication that the meteor trail is made by a swiftly moving light source that would look like, if we could have taken a very short duration exposure, more like a point source than a bright coma followed by a tail of brightly glowing plasma. The roughly constant production of light along the trajectory and its length suggests that the meteor was a so-called "earth-grazer" (not to be confused with asteroids or comets of the same name) dumping most of its kinetic energy rather high in the atmosphere along an almost horizontal path. Somebody with more time on their hands than I could develop an algorithm, using simple and fairly reliable assumptions (a straight trajectory at at a slowly decelerating velocity, damped sinusoidal oscillation, etc.) to extract a third dimension of information from the photo. In other words, a crude movie of the meteor moving across a backdrop of comet and stars could be made. I find this encoding of an extra dimension on a flat piece of film intriguing. It reminds me of holograms, although they of course encode an extra spacial, not temporal, dimension.