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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."
But what do I know, IANAA(stronomer).
I forget what 8 was for.
Although I have never seen it in a photograph, couldn't this have been caused by visual waves caused by the atmosphere?
I believe that you may almost be on to something. IAAA (I Am An Astronomer) and the "visual waves" you speak of are called "seeing"--atmospheric turbulence tends to blur out the images of stars. Though stars are generally sized 1/1000 of an arcsecond (the largest is about 50/1000), the atmosphere blurs on a scale of a few arcseconds. So if the "corkscrew" were caused by seeing, one would expect the stars to be blurred by an amount similar to the amplitude of the "corkscrew", which we do see in the image.
However, seeing (turbulence) is random. The "corkscrew" is clearly not--it appears sinusoidal. A much more likely explaination is that the telescope mount is vibrating--this would cause sinusoidal smearing of all objects in the field. the meteor, which is moving, becomes a corkscrew; the stationary stars get smeared in the direction of the vibration (as is seen in the picture). The meteor appears about 1 minute into the "2 minute exposure", and has "25 corkscrews", so the vibration is at about a half a hertz. Thus it is likely that his mount wasn't quite sturdy enough for the 'scope, or winds were abnormally high that night. Alternatively, since he apparently accounts for sidereal motion (the telescope has electronic drives to track stars, compensating for the earth's rotation), maybe the drive motors have noise at half a hertz....
That would have to be one motherfucker of a wobble to put that much wibble into a trail that lasts maybe a tenth of a second over a two minute exposure.
It looks like all the backround stars have some motion blur.
You think the stars have motion blur, look at the meteor!
The motion blur of the stars is due to their movement across the sky during the exposure (like also happened with the meteor).
I think you are right. When I looked closer at the stars, they seemed motion blurred, but in an elliptical shape. This would happen if the telescope was vibrating back and forth, in one direction. Perhaps if the telescope was on the back of a pickup truck or something we would see this.
When you look at the wavy meteorite trail, it's not a perfect sine wave. It looks like it was "waving" on an axis that wasn't perpendicular to the direction of travel. In fact, the apparent direction of the waving seems to line up with the stars motion blur. It seems the axis of vibration is rotated twenty or thirty degrees counterclockwise from the direction of the meteor. Because the stars shape and the wave of the meteor are the same, I'm inclined to agree that this is some kind of vibrational anomoly.
What do you guys think?
I've seen meteors do this, with naked-eye observations during one of the more active fall showers a few years ago. In fact, most of the larger or brighter ones seemed to do it with varying intensity. It's not atmospheric distortion. It's way too periodic.
I've also seen them with second or third order oscillations, making larger spirals like a big, fast, heavy leaf 'fluttering' to the ground.
I just assumed that it was the meteor tumbling like it's probably going to - considering it's not probably not an aerodynamically stable shape - and just spewing and sputtering ablating matter as it burned up.
Why is this a mystery? Anyone that's shot irregular flakes of rocks (or, say, pennies) out of a wrist-rocket or slingshot will see that they behave in much the same way - aerodynamically unstable objects tumbling and spinning from drag as they pass through the atmosphere at high speed.
When you look at the wavy meteorite trail, it's not a perfect sine wave.
Perhaps the meteor has a highly irregular elongated shape, and reflects light unevenly as it rotates, producing the irregular trail.
Gene, your explanation is unlikely.
The light of a meteor originates from super-heated plasma that forms in front of a meteor, as it drags through air at a high speed. It is not a part of a meteor body itself that is glowing and spinning as it run across the sky.
Besides, these meteors (that disintegrates) are very small (less than an inch). I doubt that we would see any significant sign of spinning if it is so small (the oscillation amplitude of the contrail can imply the scale size of a meteor, which must be huge if it is indeed a spinning rock shown in the photo).
The killer evidence, to me, is that the direction of blur shown in the field stars is aligned with the motion of the wobbly contrail of the meteor. Its oscillatory amplitude declines as it passes, also. That may be a signature of vibration dumping in the support mount of the camera.
I've read a part of Camille Flammarion before. He's an interesting observer (and a very literate one at that). But I won't take his drawing in his book as always accurate.
With the naked eye. I was spending the night at Santa Cruz island, Channel Islands, California. It was in November and we had sailed out there to spend the night. It was very clear that night and dark. No city light (I live in Los Angeles). You could see the Milky Way. Then my friend and I noticed little metior streaks, kinda nice. The I saw this large one, it wasn't the line flash you see all the time. This was slower moving and corkscrew. It traveled across the sky and the trail glowed for a few seconds. I though it was something that happens all the time.
Also, with no vibrations, should not the stars be smeared in the opposite direction of the Earth's rotation? If so - and if the distance of their smears roughly corresponds to the distance at which they should travel across the sky in two minutes (I am not certain that they would travel that far however) - then the vibration theory could be discounted.
Also note that the amplitudes are not uniform. If the object was indeed traveling in some sort of cork-screw fashion, then it would seem likely that from most vantage points, the amplitudes would increase and decrease; unless the camera was positioned such that it pointed perpendicular to the comets trajectory.
And then by the same reasoning, the frequency should appear to decrease as the object approaches. But the frequency seems to stay uniform.
This is a weird photo.